Waaay back, I thought Bitcoin was a cool technology, and convinced some friends of mine with businesses to accept it. We had a lot of fun with it - it was really cool to pay for your beer by scanning a QR code and seeing the transaction come through this public, distributed, tamper proof ledger, like magic, with no need for money, banks or any of the other financial infrastructure we're used to.
Sadly, the "crypto space" was quickly invaded by hordes of people who never really cared about the technology itself, how it works and what it's actually useful for. (and what it's not useful for)
These people, who know nothing about it, and for years had dismissed it as a joke, suddenly began to talk about it very seriously as a very serious "investment" in self-proclaimed "expert" capacity.
You know the type of person I'm talking about! We've all seen them, and most of us can probably count one or two amongst our friends.
The potential for cool applications of blockchains is still there, but so far it seems to me cryptocurrency has mostly just been abused as a vehicle for crazy, baseless manias, and little to no meaningful application.
> First rule of designing anything is what I would call Tucker's Second Law: "if some cunt can make a buck by completely fucking over your system then that cunt will completely fuck over your system because that cunt is a cunt."
This, in essence, is really the problem with crypto. In many ways I think people took the banking crisis of 2008 and learned exactly the wrong lessons (because that, too, was a result of this "law").
I've looped back to crypto currencies three times over the last decade. Each time I started it with a bit of hope that the space progressed and it was time to invest, each time I was disappointed to see it only got worse.
Every project is either an obvious scam and money grab or has fundamental flaw(a) that make it useless for it's original purpose.
I thought bitcoin was cool when coins were just a cent. I can’t wait for them to get back to a realistic price so they can actually be used.
I would like a digital currency, but as long as dufuses are incentivized to hype coins to trick others into making them rich these coins aren’t actually useful.
quickly invaded by hordes of people who never really cared about the technology itself, how it works and what it's actually useful for.
Not really disagreeing with you, but maybe Bitcoin wasn't really ever about an alternative currency for buying a few beers, just like gold isn't suited for that purpose. It is certainly possible, if the buyer and seller jump through some hoops to make it happen, as you demonstrated -- but it's slow and expensive for that use case. In the long run, maybe you're the person who really misunderstands what Bitcoin is "actually useful for."
Sadly I was too much of a socialist and there for the tech and utility. Suffice it to say that people threw money at memecoins way more than they threw up money at us, but we did raise a respectable amount in 2018: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1733567/000173356718...
My vision was mainstream adoption of crypto for all the right reasons. Every community having their own coin and their own monetary policy. https://intercoin.org/communities.pdf
I already had an open source social platform (https://github.com/Qbix) with people in over 100 countries so it seemed like building a payment platform on top of it made sense. So this is what I did:
Launched a show where I interviewed economists, regulators, and people like Noam Chomsky and Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton Friedman) https://youtube.com/intercoin
And we do it on our own platform, livestreaming through peer to peer broadcasting, the works!
Next on our roadmap is to release Intercoin Wallet (completely web-based wallet will try to fix major security flaws in the current Web3 ecosystem) and Intercloud (decentralized layer 1 solution that is NOT a blockchain)
But on HN we get lumped in with the rest of the Web3 bullshit and scam artists, so what can I say. This will probably be downvoted by people who never click a single link in the comment :-P
The actual value of crypto as a technology seems to have receeded past visibility. At its origin, it promised enduring new forms of interconnected computing. But overwhelmingly, there seem to be no contemporary applications of any note, just endless cryptocoins of unremarkable note as far as the eye can see.
> At it's [sic] origin, it promised enduring new forms of interconnected computing.
Have you read the Bitcoin whitepaper? You should, it’s not that long. This is not what was promised. We were promised a decentralized peer to peer currency with a fixed supply that couldn’t be inflated at the whims of a central bank. We got that. And we sort of also got “new forms of interconnected computing”. We now have new types of zero knowledge proofs which were designed for smart contract verification but are more generally useful. We have things like IPFS allowing you to store data in a decentralized way. There’s helium, a mesh network for IoT devices. We have ENS. Then of course we have an endless supply of sophisticated financial instruments which you probably wouldn’t be able to access otherwise.
Your position is easy to take because it’s sort of the “default” that an uninformed person would believe, and those people will side with you.
Probably because there never was any actual value to be had in the underlying technology. If there was someone would have found it at some point in the last decade.
Digital art where artists get paid and royalties are enforced, instant global money transfer, software standards for fractionalised investments in stocks real estate physical collectibles and other asset classes, retail without 3% going to visa, digital gold, a world where everybody has a friendly name for their public key and we can communicate privately, probably others.
> But overwhelmingly, there seem to be no contemporary applications of any note, just endless cryptocoins of unremarkable note as far as the eye can see.
There is a use case. NFTs for example can be used for ticketing systems. Here is a real world use case which you can see for your own eyes. [0]
Now there's a pithy title that vastly understates the case. There was an article on here earlier about how the Secret Service take on crypto that pretty much utterly destroys all of the crypto hype mill talking points about decentralization, anonimity, etc. I'm glad that I've lived long enough to see that particular arc of bullshit run it's course.
Written byby someone who does not understand it much if at all. And I don't mean doesn't understand it like a technical person or cult like devotee, I mean they have very little surface knowledge. Typical of legacy media institutions.
"Crypto" initial excitement was self sovereign money. Later came the other stuff, the web3 smart contract stuff. I'd say bitcoin (little b, the idea, not just the network, other thinks like Litecoin and Monero qualify) quite live up to their initial excitement. I can store an arbitrary amount of wealth in my head that cannot be taken from me via legal processes, and I can send it to anyone I like and nobody can stop me. They can punish me, but they can't stop me. This is a revolutionary thing that IMO makes this supposed competition with traditional banking a no contest. There are selective pressures at work here. It has an algorithmically deterministic supply. I believe this is the future of money.
Crypto without the currency, not talking about cryptography, is basically just ethereum. That has definitely not lived up to the hype. We never got mist browser, swarm, bzz, all the things that originally constituted the whole web3 concept. What appears to have emerged is basically a large unregulated (and unregulatable) securities exchange. This in itself can be seen as a positive thing, I think it is, but it doesnt live up. There are a few very (not to understate, very very) interesting things being done with it, but this stuff was supposed to reinvent communication and incentive structures, allow people to organize in novel ways. This has not happened and it doesn't look like it is going to happen. Instead we get NFT cartoon drawings and meme coins, interspersed with a few really inventive financial tools here and there. It's looking more and more like this is going to replace stock exchanges moreso than allow people to create autonomous organizations that control real world assets anonymously with collateralized deterministic agreements that need no court system to resolve disputes.
At least crypto is unaffected by the AI nonsense and it is not going anywhere. For both crypto and AI, the genie is out of the bottle and they cannot be stopped. Not even this crypto project [0]. But of course, no-one cares until it is too late.
So instead of listening to bullshit articles like this one repeat the same arguments about cryptocurrencies, lets see what happens in the next Bitcoin halving cycle.
Not much of a crypto currency enthusiast but i find this paragraph amusing:
“The market value of all cryptocurrencies ballooned from $250bn at the start of 2020 to $3trn by late 2021. But it has since fallen back to just $1.3trn. ”
That is larger than the entire economy of some developed countries.
I don’t think it’s fair to value crypto at $1.3T as there’s a substantial amount of self dealing to inflate asset prices. I don’t believe the value of the NFT market either when people are selling things to themself and claiming a market value.
It’s like claiming the economy in Roblox has some massive amount when there’s no actual check or way to determine actual liquid value. If people wanted to sell all their crypto they aren’t getting $1.4T. If people want to sell $1.4T of US fiat, they are probably getting around$1.4T.
(disclaimer: I project managed the Ethereum launch in 2015)
The big problem with crypto is legal, and that problem breaks up into four categories.
1) legality of tokens of various kinds (are they securities? who can do what with tokens?)
2) KYC AML CTF PEP OFAC SOF issues: governments want to track who is who when money moves and many governments do it in many different ways
3) Taxation frameworks, and international harmonisation of taxation frameworks
4) Enforceability of contract when smart contracts are in the mix
None of these are technology problems. All of them are problems which the legacy financial system solves with huge numbers of staff wasting their lives pushing the same paperwork for every single transaction, while the industrial-scale money laundering happens inside of fully regulated financial institutions which go rotten and print money until they get caught landed with symbolic fines after laundering tens of billions of drug money.
If governments had made their mind up about *how they were going to regulate crypto* then all of this would have been sorted out years ago and we would have a simple, stable, efficient set of new financial rails, much like a re-invention of the credit card payment system or the SWIFT bank transfer system.
But because of a failure to give clear guidance for 8 years the technology is a swamp of unregulated and poorly regulated projects, because when the actual professionals show up they can't figure out what the law is, because the law hasn't been written.
MICA in the EU starts to provide the industry the necessary clarity to actually obey the (clearly written) law and mainstream into the regular world of commerce.
In the UK, see the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce which is disambiguating the crypto mess from the Judiciary on out https://lawtechuk.io/ukjt
My company builds on the UK framework to enable buying and selling of physical assets across 170 jurisdictions on the same legal framework: http://mattereum.com
Anyway, it's a mess, but it's not the "crypto industry's" fault -- government's failure to establish clear legal rules has made institutional adoption by grown ups impossible.
As we get regulatory clarity it all goes forwards again!
Would you include political ideology as another problem? If bitcoin/ether fulfilled their potential, wouldn't that mean the US dollar would fall as the world reserve currency and thereby weaken the US government's influence? This seems to be the main reason for introducing a CBDC as it gives nation states complete control over their money.
Nobody sees the value in your programmatic money, which might as well be Canadian Tire Money or Emperor Norton Scrip.
When a government issues a digital currency in exchange for the right to live there, people will use it. But nobody wants any currency that you drew with crayons. Even if you somehow convinced some other tech bros that someone else will pay even more for it some day.
I see huge value in the idea. The problem is nobody has yet demonstrated a token that doesn't get taken over by speculators. When that happens it becomes useless as money.
And don't get me started about the "stablecoin" myth.
oh look, another highly-compressible, hn circle jerk about the "crypto" boogeyman
tbh, i'm always impressed by no-coiner and armchair bitcoiner comments -- it's like listening to a straight-edge discuss psychedelics -- how can you comment on a space you *clearly* don't understand?
It's like saying the promise of beanie babies has not lived up to its initial excitement, I mean OK what did you expect. People were excited about beanie babies. Was that bad? No, it's OK to be excited about things you like.
EDIT: everyone is downvoting me you guys must really hate beanie babies
EDIT 2: oh maybe they don't like my username. it's a joke name, people.
We’ve been over this over and over again. Tech is valuable. Alternative currency is useful in some countries. Speculation sucks. Electric usage is silly. Blah blah blah.
My bet is that crypto is going to disappear eventually.
[+] [-] neonate|2 years ago|reply
http://web.archive.org/web/20230516233219/https://www.econom...
[+] [-] bedobi|2 years ago|reply
Sadly, the "crypto space" was quickly invaded by hordes of people who never really cared about the technology itself, how it works and what it's actually useful for. (and what it's not useful for)
These people, who know nothing about it, and for years had dismissed it as a joke, suddenly began to talk about it very seriously as a very serious "investment" in self-proclaimed "expert" capacity.
You know the type of person I'm talking about! We've all seen them, and most of us can probably count one or two amongst our friends.
The potential for cool applications of blockchains is still there, but so far it seems to me cryptocurrency has mostly just been abused as a vehicle for crazy, baseless manias, and little to no meaningful application.
[+] [-] arp242|2 years ago|reply
> First rule of designing anything is what I would call Tucker's Second Law: "if some cunt can make a buck by completely fucking over your system then that cunt will completely fuck over your system because that cunt is a cunt."
This, in essence, is really the problem with crypto. In many ways I think people took the banking crisis of 2008 and learned exactly the wrong lessons (because that, too, was a result of this "law").
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34889092
[+] [-] hpeter|2 years ago|reply
I like the idea of P2P cash but I don't want the casino.I don't wanna invest, I just wanna use it as money. It didn't work out so well for that.
[+] [-] flagrant_taco|2 years ago|reply
Every project is either an obvious scam and money grab or has fundamental flaw(a) that make it useless for it's original purpose.
I'll stick with using the OG blockchain, git.
[+] [-] pazimzadeh|2 years ago|reply
I haven't met many people/anyone who went from dismissing it as a joke to taking it very seriously.
Either way, isn't "people not taking it seriously at first" one of the classic signs of disruptive innovation according to Clayten Christensen?
[+] [-] prepend|2 years ago|reply
I would like a digital currency, but as long as dufuses are incentivized to hype coins to trick others into making them rich these coins aren’t actually useful.
[+] [-] listenallyall|2 years ago|reply
Not really disagreeing with you, but maybe Bitcoin wasn't really ever about an alternative currency for buying a few beers, just like gold isn't suited for that purpose. It is certainly possible, if the buyer and seller jump through some hoops to make it happen, as you demonstrated -- but it's slow and expensive for that use case. In the long run, maybe you're the person who really misunderstands what Bitcoin is "actually useful for."
[+] [-] EGreg|2 years ago|reply
Sadly I was too much of a socialist and there for the tech and utility. Suffice it to say that people threw money at memecoins way more than they threw up money at us, but we did raise a respectable amount in 2018: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1733567/000173356718...
My vision was mainstream adoption of crypto for all the right reasons. Every community having their own coin and their own monetary policy. https://intercoin.org/communities.pdf
I already had an open source social platform (https://github.com/Qbix) with people in over 100 countries so it seemed like building a payment platform on top of it made sense. So this is what I did:
Architected all the smart contracts on https://github.com/Intercoin
Bootstrapped with revenues and customers and paid our developers for years
Released all the smart contracts and documentation on our own platform here: https://intercoin.app
Got CertiK audits of our smart contracts: https://skynet.certik.com/projects/intercoin
Launched a show where I interviewed economists, regulators, and people like Noam Chomsky and Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton Friedman) https://youtube.com/intercoin
Made ways to raise money that are actually legal: https://community.intercoin.app/t/how-intercoin-helps-to-rai...
Built technology for people around the world to raise money for refugees: https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees
By the way, if you want to come and hear more about it, you're welcome to, we have demos at the end of every month: https://intercoin.app/event/ITR/Qwwsjokht
And we do it on our own platform, livestreaming through peer to peer broadcasting, the works!
Next on our roadmap is to release Intercoin Wallet (completely web-based wallet will try to fix major security flaws in the current Web3 ecosystem) and Intercloud (decentralized layer 1 solution that is NOT a blockchain)
But on HN we get lumped in with the rest of the Web3 bullshit and scam artists, so what can I say. This will probably be downvoted by people who never click a single link in the comment :-P
[+] [-] rektide|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] auscad|2 years ago|reply
Have you read the Bitcoin whitepaper? You should, it’s not that long. This is not what was promised. We were promised a decentralized peer to peer currency with a fixed supply that couldn’t be inflated at the whims of a central bank. We got that. And we sort of also got “new forms of interconnected computing”. We now have new types of zero knowledge proofs which were designed for smart contract verification but are more generally useful. We have things like IPFS allowing you to store data in a decentralized way. There’s helium, a mesh network for IoT devices. We have ENS. Then of course we have an endless supply of sophisticated financial instruments which you probably wouldn’t be able to access otherwise.
Your position is easy to take because it’s sort of the “default” that an uninformed person would believe, and those people will side with you.
[+] [-] forgetfreeman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nailer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rvz|2 years ago|reply
There is a use case. NFTs for example can be used for ticketing systems. Here is a real world use case which you can see for your own eyes. [0]
[0] https://www.ledgerinsights.com/uks-wembley-stadium-adopts-bl...
[+] [-] forgetfreeman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ssss11|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] friend_and_foe|2 years ago|reply
"Crypto" initial excitement was self sovereign money. Later came the other stuff, the web3 smart contract stuff. I'd say bitcoin (little b, the idea, not just the network, other thinks like Litecoin and Monero qualify) quite live up to their initial excitement. I can store an arbitrary amount of wealth in my head that cannot be taken from me via legal processes, and I can send it to anyone I like and nobody can stop me. They can punish me, but they can't stop me. This is a revolutionary thing that IMO makes this supposed competition with traditional banking a no contest. There are selective pressures at work here. It has an algorithmically deterministic supply. I believe this is the future of money.
Crypto without the currency, not talking about cryptography, is basically just ethereum. That has definitely not lived up to the hype. We never got mist browser, swarm, bzz, all the things that originally constituted the whole web3 concept. What appears to have emerged is basically a large unregulated (and unregulatable) securities exchange. This in itself can be seen as a positive thing, I think it is, but it doesnt live up. There are a few very (not to understate, very very) interesting things being done with it, but this stuff was supposed to reinvent communication and incentive structures, allow people to organize in novel ways. This has not happened and it doesn't look like it is going to happen. Instead we get NFT cartoon drawings and meme coins, interspersed with a few really inventive financial tools here and there. It's looking more and more like this is going to replace stock exchanges moreso than allow people to create autonomous organizations that control real world assets anonymously with collateralized deterministic agreements that need no court system to resolve disputes.
[+] [-] rvz|2 years ago|reply
So instead of listening to bullshit articles like this one repeat the same arguments about cryptocurrencies, lets see what happens in the next Bitcoin halving cycle.
[0] https://worldcoin.org
[+] [-] gumballindie|2 years ago|reply
“The market value of all cryptocurrencies ballooned from $250bn at the start of 2020 to $3trn by late 2021. But it has since fallen back to just $1.3trn. ”
That is larger than the entire economy of some developed countries.
[+] [-] throwaway22032|2 years ago|reply
My choice quote from the article is that they consider a $1.3 trillion market to be "only".
That's just under $1 million for each copy of The Economist sold this year. Perhaps they have a distorted sense of size.
[+] [-] prepend|2 years ago|reply
It’s like claiming the economy in Roblox has some massive amount when there’s no actual check or way to determine actual liquid value. If people wanted to sell all their crypto they aren’t getting $1.4T. If people want to sell $1.4T of US fiat, they are probably getting around$1.4T.
[+] [-] asdfman123|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] leashless|2 years ago|reply
The big problem with crypto is legal, and that problem breaks up into four categories.
1) legality of tokens of various kinds (are they securities? who can do what with tokens?)
2) KYC AML CTF PEP OFAC SOF issues: governments want to track who is who when money moves and many governments do it in many different ways
3) Taxation frameworks, and international harmonisation of taxation frameworks
4) Enforceability of contract when smart contracts are in the mix
None of these are technology problems. All of them are problems which the legacy financial system solves with huge numbers of staff wasting their lives pushing the same paperwork for every single transaction, while the industrial-scale money laundering happens inside of fully regulated financial institutions which go rotten and print money until they get caught landed with symbolic fines after laundering tens of billions of drug money.
If governments had made their mind up about *how they were going to regulate crypto* then all of this would have been sorted out years ago and we would have a simple, stable, efficient set of new financial rails, much like a re-invention of the credit card payment system or the SWIFT bank transfer system.
But because of a failure to give clear guidance for 8 years the technology is a swamp of unregulated and poorly regulated projects, because when the actual professionals show up they can't figure out what the law is, because the law hasn't been written.
MICA in the EU starts to provide the industry the necessary clarity to actually obey the (clearly written) law and mainstream into the regular world of commerce.
In the UK, see the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce which is disambiguating the crypto mess from the Judiciary on out https://lawtechuk.io/ukjt
And also the upcoming Law Commission work https://www.lawcom.gov.uk/project/digital-assets/ (warning: contains 550 pages of UK government legal analysis)
My company builds on the UK framework to enable buying and selling of physical assets across 170 jurisdictions on the same legal framework: http://mattereum.com
Anyway, it's a mess, but it's not the "crypto industry's" fault -- government's failure to establish clear legal rules has made institutional adoption by grown ups impossible.
As we get regulatory clarity it all goes forwards again!
[+] [-] tells|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b0sk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jl2718|2 years ago|reply
Please stop using this prefix by itself.
[+] [-] Zpalmtree|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfengel|2 years ago|reply
Nobody sees the value in your programmatic money, which might as well be Canadian Tire Money or Emperor Norton Scrip.
When a government issues a digital currency in exchange for the right to live there, people will use it. But nobody wants any currency that you drew with crayons. Even if you somehow convinced some other tech bros that someone else will pay even more for it some day.
[+] [-] dreamcompiler|2 years ago|reply
And don't get me started about the "stablecoin" myth.
[+] [-] frankreyes|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sherry5530|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nostromo177|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] s1gnp0st|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dang|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arp242|2 years ago|reply
https://www.lookintobitcoin.com/charts/bitcoin-active-addres...
[+] [-] asdfman123|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raffy|2 years ago|reply
tbh, i'm always impressed by no-coiner and armchair bitcoiner comments -- it's like listening to a straight-edge discuss psychedelics -- how can you comment on a space you *clearly* don't understand?
[+] [-] ftxbro|2 years ago|reply
EDIT: everyone is downvoting me you guys must really hate beanie babies
EDIT 2: oh maybe they don't like my username. it's a joke name, people.
[+] [-] d--b|2 years ago|reply
My bet is that crypto is going to disappear eventually.