Absent that emotional fulfilment its just boring old money.

Native peoples were slaughtered and forced off their land. Natural resources were mined and hunted with no regard for long-term sustainability. There was slave labor, sex trafficking, and endless profiteering based on speculation or downright lies. The rich got richer and maybe some poor people got a leg up? A whole lot of people ended up poorer, sicker, or dead.

So yeah, maybe cryptocurrencies are a bit like the wild west.

There are ways of taking risks, exploring, and pushing boundaries that don't put vulnerable people at greater risk. As far as I can tell the wild west and cryptocurrencies aren't it.

Fair points about the American Wild West and lawlessness, genocide, etc. But I think a better analogy would be the medieval era. The economic similarities between cryptocurrencies and feudalism have been fairly well discussed already, e.g. the privatisation of money creation, proliferation of decentralised currency fiefdoms, the crypto-VCs and crypto-oligarchs the new feudal lords and the "hodlers" the new vassals, etc. But the potential social impact hasn't really been discussed much. If the crypto-lords, supported by their crypto-serfs, do succeed in breaking down the social contract, we do risk returning to an era when life was "nasty, brutish and short". Life in the medieval era, before the Age of Enlightenment, when magic and superstition ruled everyday life, when there was the ever-present threat of plague, pestilence and famine, makes the Wild West sound not so bad after all, and is not something I would have thought many would consider aspirational.

Did it? The internet I see is largely overrun by bandits and shysters looking to make a quick buck at the expense of every sucker they can find.

Here are some reasons why people might be interested in the cryptocurrencies ecosystem:

- Paying 3% per credit card transactions isn't efficient

- Decentralized Finance matters. The DeFi movement is actually really interesting. You should look into decentralized lending protocols with stablecoins.

- Decentralized Governance is exciting and can facilitate new experiments like Quadratic voting

Even if it is functional PoS (which sounds like a codified plutocracy, but I could be wrong), they still managed to botch securities regulations. Even if they sneak past that somehow, it seems likely they'll also fall afoul of AML/KYC regulations.

Maybe not! Maybe they're finally the ones who will do it all! Legal and ecologically responsible! If so they're off to a very bad start.

https://blog.dshr.org/2018/03/proofs-of-space.html

https://blog.dshr.org/2018/09/chia-network.html

> Note also that it is possible at low cost to rent very large amounts of storage and computation for short periods of time in order to mount a 51% attack on a PoSp/VDP network in the same way that "mining as a service" enables 51% attacks on alt-coins.

> For example, a back-of-the-envelope computation of a hour-long Petabyte attack at Amazon would start by using about 7 days of AWS Free Tier to write the data to the sc1 version of Elastic Block Storage. The EBS would cost $35/PB/hr, so the setup would cost $2940. Then the actual hour-long attack would cost $35, for a total of just under $3000.

> I'm skeptical that the low-reward approach to maintaining decentralization is viable.

Maybe this? https://github.com/filecoin-project/research/blob/master/ope...

I don't have the time/desire right now to figure out how the project is doing and the soundness of the approach.

https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/378.pdf