This is such a simplistic view of “the little guy”. The dollar system is set up such that they have to ‘invest’ or else they will never be able to afford a house. Savings will bankrupt them. Stocks are meaningless, just handing your money to rich people that will never give it back in hopes that you can sell it for more later. But the whole system looks like it’s in free fall, so that doesn’t seem likely. Crypto would have zero value if normal people weren’t scared and distrustful. I can’t recall a market mania that didn’t start with massive rises in home prices.

> Crypto would have zero value if normal people weren’t scared and distrustful.

That implies cryptocurrencies provide no value by themselves and is simply false. Ethereum is essentially a distributed virtual machine that anyone can pay to use. Monero offers complete financial privacy.

>Ethereum is essentially a distributed virtual machine that anyone can pay to use.

...that is unbelievably slow, limited, difficult to use, and makes it impossible to fix bugs.

It's absolutely fascinating in principle, yes. But in practice it's a solution in search of a problem.

> that is unbelievably slow, inefficient, and makes it impossible to fix bugs

I don't dispute that. The real innovation lies in the decentralization. Unfortunately, decentralization is threatened by centralized mining operations who resist changes to the network such as migration to proof of stake. Bitcoin also suffers from the same problem with miners effectively controlling the protocol and as a result the coin has remained static for a long time.

Monero seems to be having success avoiding the influence of miners. They adopted ASIC and GPU resistant algorithms which makes it viable to mine XMR on normal CPUs, allowing more people to participate and as a result making the coin more decentralized.

I’ll be the first one to say that crypto is often the superior system. But only due to the threat. A threat I happen to believe is very dangerous. Any security model only has value in the presence of a threat model. Other than that it’s just inefficient.

Indeed. The threat is real and will continue to be real for as long as governments exist. Maybe the threat is centralized authorities in general.

My country experienced runaway inflation in the 1990s. In a desperate attempt to stop it, the president just froze everyone's bank accounts. The government took away everyone's money out of nowhere. So I don't really care how much energy cryptocurrency consumes. If it puts an end to government stupidity it's worth it. The more they hate cryptocurrency the better -- it means they can't control it.

What sort of operations are people running on the Ethereum VM?

I've seen interest bearing crypto accounts. You can get 6% APY on stablecoins. Any project that promises you more than that is calculating APY for the current day or hour. 40% APY for less than a single day is just misleading advertisement.

Although I am generally against cryptocurrencies, I cannot be against the idea of building a decentralized banking system (cryptocurrencies are merely cash). I mean, if we get to do it with fiat, they surely deserve to do it with their cryptocurrencies.

Currently the smart contract software projects are focused on decentralized finance since the only input necessary for that is ETH currency. New tokens, decentralized exchanges and so on.

People created Chainlink to bring real world data inputs to Ethereum software. Data such as "package has arrived to its destination". It hasn't delivered on its promise yet unfortunately. If it ever does, all bets will be off.

I have multiple decentralized websites and even a search engine on IPFS (the p2p web3 protocol)

>The dollar system is set up such that they have to ‘invest’ or else they will never be able to afford a house. Savings will bankrupt them.

This is what happens when inflation is low, yet people consider inflation the devil. If the Fed could actually hit inflation goals this whole farce would be over. We'd be at the end of the long term debt cycle and a whole lot of fake value would disappear into thin air and after all the bad debt and bad companies have been cleaned up, there would be enough room for productive companies.

>It's just greed, plain and simple.

Seeing someone pay off their student loans or their credit cards on an income similar or lower than yours by “investing” in a ICO at the right time and trying to find the next opportunity is greed to you?

I’d say the little guy is desperate to get out underneath whatever has them in dire straights to reasonably think a “gamble” as rational.

Are you asserting that lower income people cannot be as greedy as higher income people?

The common definition of greed would be the selfish desire of more than one needs, the "little guy" by definition that us taken by investment scams or mass Crypto pump and dump scams usually isn't seeking more than they need, but in such a desperate and dire financial and economic position they are usually just attempting to gain some footing to put them on level ground. At the end of the day the scams exist because they work, whether you blame it on their the greed of the victim or it is just an act of desperation is irrelevant, the conduct that can and should be regulated is that of the scammers.

Greed is the desire to accumulate wealth for its own sake. I don't think it makes sense to characterize a low-income person as greedy for trying to improve their situation somewhat.

>It's just greed, plain and simple.

I get that position, but it is a lot more than greed...or maybe a lot less.

It is uneducated investors that see something they don't understand that is unregulated, easily accessible and being marketed to them in ways they should be considered lying and defrauding.

Again the fact that you have a CEO of a publicly traded company constantly Tweeting Doge to the Moon...its easy to say well you bought in thats just greed, fine, but its dystopian as hell.

Since 1971 essentially all gains in wealth in the first world have been captured by the very wealthy, who have enjoyed an acceleration feedback loop between their capture of wealth, and capture of government, hence all effective means on checking that accumulation.

Any analysis that does not start with this is either complicit, intentionally or merely because the author has enoyed incidental residual benefit; or ignorant.

There is no mystery why there is an aura of mingled desperation, FOMO, and nihilism; to focus on the "greed" is to ignore what is animating Hail Mary attempts to finding a short path to stability, is that every traditional long path has been quietly consistently dismantled.

Better crypto than Q. But it won't stop what's coming.

What's coming is dramatically increased domestic unrest driven by the attempt to use the technologies so many here are helping build, to keep a pressure lid on and further the devolution into a two-class society.

Enjoying the dregs of the 1%? Set the autopilot for Mars, just don't take your hands off the wheel.

Another thing to keep in mind is that people can gamble for fun while knowing their limits. At least with GameSpot, reporters didn’t seem to be finding ordinary investors in significant financial trouble?

Sometimes the gambling is aggressively dumb but the marks still walk away pretty much okay, like someone who had a fun time losing money on rigged carnival games.