It was only a handful of engineers who "created the space" to begin with, so even though there isn't much overlap, it's pretty much always been a community made up of shady folks, it's only that the fraudsters have become less technically sophisticated and more brazen as activity has increased and the blockchain community has grown and continued to radiate cosmic rays of hype.

> always been a community made up of shady folks

That's not fair. Shady folks are just getting more publicity. Noone talks about people who created stuff that works and doesn't scam people. And there's a lot of such stuff. This space is growing because of such people, despite the shady folks.

>Noone talks about people who created stuff that works and doesn't scam people. And there's a lot of such stuff.

No, there isn't. It's always been nebulous talk of "potential" without any concrete uses beyond scams and criminal activity. There have just been iterations of tools for those areas. Then you have the near-religious libertarian True Believers who promote as a matter of faith, regardless of what the reality is.

This article remains ever-so-relevant:

>Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...

True democratic and transparent electronic voting system is a legitimate use case for the block chain.

The fact it's hard to not only implement correctly, but to promote to society does not mean it's not relevant.

Good things take time.

Remember that people thought for some time that general relativity and the Law of large Numbers would never have practical applications.

>True democratic and transparent electronic voting system is a legitimate use case for the block chain.

As always with these claims (that, as noted below, have not actually been implemented and so can only be speculated on), the question isn't whether this could be done with the blockchain, but rather whether this requires the blockchain to be done.

All too often the claimed magical things the blockchain will allow can be implemented far more easily with other, existing technology. So far it's a solution in search of a problem.

Nobody is talking magic. We have a system with characteristics that maps to problems we wish to solve and we try to do it.

Nothing wrong with that.

The fact crypto is riddle with quick money making claims and project using the blockchain for sheer buzziness tends to make skeptics extra pessimistics in their views.

It's unfair to the technology.

We have a transaction oriented temper proof distributed transparent database.

Those are objective features, and they deserve we give them a try.

> True democratic and transparent electronic voting system is a legitimate use case for the block chain.

Full public transparency isn't that great a property of a voting system.

And it's hard to call it a "legitimate use case" before it's successful.

Transparency of votes doesn't have to map to identity of voters. The blockchain is transparent, what you put inside is left to the implementer to choose.

And come on, it's a highly experimental technology whise use cases impact the most controversial aspects of our society : money, vote, accountability, transparency, power to the masse.

Of course it's going to take time and fail in many spectacular ways.

> It's always been nebulous talk of "potential" without any concrete uses beyond scams and criminal activity.

I suppose it might count as criminal activity, but as far as I know, it's the only way to donate to Sci Hub.

http://sci-hub.tw/#donate

Part of why bitcoin was semi viable before it's intentional scarcity killed all of growth potential is that any society needs a gray market of things that are illegal but often essential for social mobility(like pirated textbooks and academic papers, or unmonitored cross border communication).

The problem for bitcoin arrived when people begun to see it as something that could be more then an underground activity and started treating it like an investment object and essentially reinvented the old failed concept of "wildcat currencies" with an intentional scarce currency, something made viable by the libertarian refusal to even look at the real world history of economics.

What we now have is a bitcoin economy thats hit a hard(intentional) limit of growth forcing people to branch away from bitcoin as the revolutionary application of blockchain in a world where some minor advances are made in actually using the underlying theory for something other then scams, creating a market ripe for new wildcat currencies pretenting to be be "what bitcoin failed to become".

I didn't say they were evil, but most of the early activity around bitcoin was swirling around in the dark markets which I think is totally fair to describe as shady.

Those were the users, not the creators.

To this day nobody knows who Satoshi Nakamoto actually is, while that's not super shady it also ain't exactly transparent.

I wasn't referring to the users, but the creators and the users are inextricable, someone "created" all those dark markets where the users participated.

I would love to see a list of CONCRETE examples of cryptocoins that are doing good, productive things TODAY.

Not a list but:

"UN’s World Food Programme Builds on Ethereum Blockchain Money Transfers"

https://www.ccn.com/banks-begone-uns-world-food-programme-bu...

"The pilot alone is said to save the agency $150,000 a month while eliminating a staggering 98% of bank-related transfer fees, according to Munich WFP innovation lab chief Bernhard Kowatsch."

I don't see how blockchain is relevant to that solution. Couldn't they do the same thing with any database-backed web app tracking account balances?

There you go if you want a list of concrete examples: https://pineapplefund.org/

> always been a community made up of shady folks

This is so clearly false that it overshadows the rest of your comment. You _cannot_ claim these things without proof and your point is so easily disproven that it's not worth the time to even do so.

Every time tech people invent a new way for people to interact, someone comes along and figures out a way to use it for a scammy interaction. And it's effective because it is new, which means it is both exciting and poorly understood.

The difference here is that there’s not much else. In contrast, things like the internet or web had tons of legitimate use from day 1.

Yeah, this particular technology is particularly vulnerable to scamming for additional reasons. Not just lack of widespread usefulness, but because it's also _close_ solving a real problem people think they have. And it's just legitimate enough that it has some valid niche uses, which lends an air of credibility to the whole thing. It's merely a scam, it's something which can be turned into a scam.