> I lived through the 80s and early 90s. The difference is that I could do stuff with the early Internet. I could do stuff with BBSes. I could do stuff with early PCs. These things were almost immediately very useful to a lot of people.

You must have hung out with a nerdier crowd than I did :) I was the only person I knew who owned a personal computer until well into the late 90s.

> The reason I've become a bear on cryptocurrency is that I don't see the utility to justify the monstrous amounts of money pouring into it. It's almost 10 years old and today it's actually less useful than it was a few years ago due to runaway fee growth.

So I think cryptocurrency here is getting conflated with the underlying technology, just like Geocities came to be the poster child of the early web. I agree with you that the current systems have much work to be done, and that many of them will be abandoned before they're fixed. But cryptocurrency is not the blockchain anymore than gopher was the internet. Services like Bitcoin built on blockchains may cease to exist in their current state, but just like we still have TCP/IP, I think the blockchain piece will be essential moving forward.

> That and I see a ton of scams. Almost all cryptocurrency projects seem like either scams or delusional vaporware projects akin to badly thought out Kickstarters or over-funded boil-the-ocean startups. These things rarely accomplish anything other than to blow a lot of money.

I get a lot of scams via postal mail, telephone, and the email, but that doesn't negate the purpose of the technology :)

> Want to change my mind? Show me the cryptocurrency killer app that people are climbing over each other to use.

I think you misunderstand my viewpoint. I don't think the technologies of today are the solutions anymore than Geocities was the be-all-end-all of the web. My comments are more directed toward those who believe this technology leads to a dead end and that reducing the reliance on third party trust is not a problem that needs to be worked on.

I liked your answer. But you didn't answer his/her other criticism: "...It's almost 10 years old and today it's actually less useful than it was a few years ago due to runaway fee growth. The feedback system works in the wrong direction. Did the Internet get less useful the more people used it?"

The fact that network effects to some extent works in the wrong direction for this technology is concerning. What happens when the current speculative cycle comes to an end and crypto needs to justify itself by its utility to end-users as opposed to investors?

P.S. Beside this point but one thing that can work in favor of crypto is the conflation of investors & users. You essentially get so many evangelicals for your project from the investment perspective "for free". If you can turn them to users, then you are in a nice shape. Though issue is that most these investors are only summertime soldiers.

Cryptocurrency isn't blockchains anymore than AOL is the Internet. Bitcoin may be getting less useful, showing that a proof of work system that incentivizes miners the way it does may be broken, but this doesn't fundamentally cease to justify the use of blockchains as a data structure. It just means we need to figure out a way to keep blockchain security while improving/replacing proof of work.

That's a totally inappropriate analogy. AOL was a company, not a class of technology like cryptocurrency. You could compare a specific instance of cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin, to AOL, but not the category as a whole.

Cryptocurrency is a vital component of the distributed blockchain architecture. It provides the decentralized economic layer, without which blockchains would be centralized by virtue of their dependence on a centralized payment processor.

> AOL was a company, not a class of technology like cryptocurrency.

You know this, but many users of AOL didn't. To them, AOL was equal to the internet, like many people believe that cryptocurrency is the only application of blockchains as a data structure.

> Cryptocurrency is a vital component of the distributed blockchain architecture.

It is now, but that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. Cryptocurrency is one of many applications that can be built on top of a distributed ledger. There are many applications that have nothing to do with payment processing.

You didn't respond to the fact that cryptocurrency is a technology class or my reasoning for my cryptocurrency is vital for blockchains to have the property of being distributed.

The way I view cryptocurrencies is that they're a service like HTTP or SMTP on top of a blockchain, which would be analogous to TCP/IP. Cryptocurrencies are only one of many uses of blockchains.

I disagree with the notion that a cryptocurrency is a vital property of the distributed nature of blockchains. The purpose they serve now is to incentivize individuals to participate in the network who wouldn't otherwise participate by paying them a currency to represent the value of the service they've provided.

But for instance, you could also have private blockchains where the incentive for running a node is access to that blockchain's data. There does have to be an incentive to run nodes, but it doesn't necessarily have to be monetary.

>>But for instance, you could also have private blockchains where the incentive for running a node is access to that blockchain's data.

That's not a decentralized blockchain. It's the decentralized consensus that is novel. Without decentralization, it's just an append only database.

Just because it's private doesn't mean it's decentralized in a protocol sense. The nodes in the private blockchain would still be distrustful of each other and would still undergo decentralized consensus.

As for compensation, rather than receiving a coin as a reward for doing proof of work mining, you would gain a key to enable you to read certain encrypted data on the blockchain, for instance.

What you're describing is not an open AND decentralized (however way you want to define 'decentralized') platform, and its applications are much more limited.

And your scheme does require some amount of trust. Induction into the consensus node set would need to be controlled to prevent bad actors from disrupting the flow.

The problem is not PoW. The fundamental problem of cryptocurrency is scalability. In my understanding, a system is called scalable if adding 1 unit of resource to an existing amount of resource m, improves the performance by roughly (m+1)/m.

This is not a property these systems possess. The computational power of the system remains is bounded by the computational power of weakest full-node.

But gambling is a real-world use case. There is plenty of real-world illegal activities that benefit from bitcoin, and they can all deal just fine with high transaction fees, delays, volatility, etc.

According to your logic, pretty much any illegal activity will - by definition - have real world use cases, and should be permissible.

No. I did not say anything about permissibility, only about utility.