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Re:Starting a crypto project by berkes on Thursday May 06, 2021 @08:45AM (#27062365)
How is this any different from the "web tech" space at large? Where investors will push towards "data-hoarding", privacy-invasion, dark patterns and/or addictiveness or other psychological "abuse", more often than not?
Re:Starting a crypto project by throwaway_kufu on Thursday May 06, 2021 @11:27AM (#27064684)
Because these crypto companies are generally deliberately marketing themselves as the democratic solution to the original problem through this new decentralized technology. Then when their private discord and telegram groups get exposed for pump and dump scams, their go to defense rings of your comment “so what, it’s the way it’s always been”
Re:Starting a crypto project by celticninja on Thursday May 06, 2021 @10:32PM (#27071335)
I think the real issue is that in 2009-2013 it was used by people who understood the risks. Now it is used by retail investors with no clue, who will be hit hardest by it.

I suggested everyone buy it when it was under $500, I said invest with caution up to $1000. Now I can't in good faith suggest to people that they buy it. And I am fortunate, everyone who did buy it on my suggestion made plenty of money.. probably because they had me in their ear saying "don't sell it" when they hit their first bitcoin drop. I get messages often thanking me for introducing them to cryptocurrency. However I and sure that there are many who didn't buy it and now regret it. Same as there are others who bought it, sold at a loss and regret it. It has been repeated as Infinitum, only invest what you can afford to lose and that is most definitely still the case. Bitcoin can still go to zero (or close enough not to matter) but It could also go to $100,000, and right now latter is more likely, but I feel as the price goes up so does the chance it goes to zero.

Re:Starting a crypto project by throwaway_kufu on Friday May 07, 2021 @01:20AM (#27072471)
The thing is your entire post is about investment and making money or losing money...what does that have to do with p2p electronic currency and the democratization of money?

Buy/hodl has converted the concept for electronic currency, if there really ever was one, into a money making endeavor based on your current wealth and ability to risk a loss. That’s the antithesis of democratization, or 1 person 1 vote, but a I was here first so that makes me king now get on your knees and grovel at my supremacy.

The only real way to look at Bitcoin is as if there is an AI operating in the background with the sole intent of taking “investors” money through constant cycles of FOMO pump and dumps. It’s a stock without any assets or profits backing its value, at any point the shareholders could just start a new company and nothing would be lost by abandoning Bitcoin, because it’s just a shell company with nothing inside.

Re:Starting a crypto project by tnzm on Thursday May 06, 2021 @09:11AM (#27062678)
That's why it's the investment space that needs disruption - which is why crypto is met with so much pushback on HN. A year ago, crypto-related stories made front page much less often, if at all.
Re:Starting a crypto project by tinyhouse on Thursday May 06, 2021 @11:58AM (#27065185)
Because people here try to understand the technology and its usage before riding the hype train. Most people investing in Ether for example have no idea what it even means. But when you ask them they would spit answers like "it's going to revolutionize finance..". When you ask them how, they have no answer. When you ask them for specific applications that they know of outside of the stupid NFT, they send you to Google. Yesterday someone on Youtube gave an example about a fridge that will order you eggs and milk when they run out, and everything will be done on the blockchain.

Not a crypto hater. I even invest for fun and because you cannot deny the opportunity to make money rn. But don't expect people to ride the train blindly. I do think that crypto isn't going anywhere. But the current valuation of these coins is just absurd rn.

Re:Starting a crypto project by intotheabyss on Thursday May 06, 2021 @12:23PM (#27065583)
There are plenty of useful applications on Ethereum. Maker, Compound, Aave, dYdX, Synthetix, UMA, Uniswap to name very few.
Re:Starting a crypto project by notJim on Thursday May 06, 2021 @02:29PM (#27067334)
IMO these things are basically driven by speculation as well. From what I can tell, they mainly provide liquidity for financial institutions. Financial institutions are interested in crypto so that they can make money trading it. IMO there is very little actual utility here.
Re:Starting a crypto project by arberx on Thursday May 06, 2021 @06:24PM (#27069742)
Very actual real utility here?

What's utility to you? Is buying a in-game COD skin utility? Or how about roblox bucks? How about the trillion dollar derivatives market?

All those things easily disrupted by DeFi.

Re:Starting a crypto project by notJim on Thursday May 06, 2021 @07:02PM (#27069976)
I think it's a fair question, but these are not great examples, IMO.

COD skins and Roblox bucks can only be produced and sold by one company, so I don't see why you would need a decentralized protocol for them. CS:GO doesn't use DeFi, and apparently the market was active enough to be used almost entirely for money laundering.

For other financial markets, I can definitely see more of a case to be made, but it remains to be seen whether that will actually take off. From what I've seen, the crypto markets right now are primarily dealing in crypto, as I said.

Re:Starting a crypto project by arberx on Thursday May 06, 2021 @07:12PM (#27070044)
The difference with COD skins being in-game vs on a blockchain is not only can you associate a universal identity to them (your wallet address), but anyone can see and trade for them anywhere. Maybe not the best example, but if you generalize to artwork/digital content it really makes sense.
Re:Starting a crypto project by aero- on Thursday May 06, 2021 @08:51PM (#27070694)
Why would you need to trade your COD skin through a decentralized distributed network if that skin is only usable through a specific centralized game?

The use cases for CRYPTO and NFT are extremely small.

Its a solution that's been looking for a problem for over 10 years.

Re:Starting a crypto project by acjohnson55 on Thursday May 06, 2021 @11:24PM (#27071785)
Agreed. I think the real use for NFT is tradable identities/roles, which grant access to digital or physical experiences that span organizations. Remains to be seen whether someone builds a killer app/experience around that. So far, people are only interested in mundane simulation of physical scarcity.
Re:Starting a crypto project by thegreatpeter on Thursday May 06, 2021 @08:49PM (#27070676)
why would COD allow that to happen
Re:Starting a crypto project by tnzm on Friday May 07, 2021 @02:19AM (#27072854)
Did you accidentally a word?

>Is buying a in-game COD skin utility? Or how about roblox bucks? How about the trillion dollar derivatives market?

No.

Re:Starting a crypto project by tnzm on Thursday May 06, 2021 @10:52PM (#27071513)
I suspect financial institutions are interested in crypto because they don't want a new financial system with a more democratic organizational model to make them obsolete.

Maybe there are some forward thinking people there who want crypto to be the driving factor behind refactoring from COBOL, who knows.

Re:Starting a crypto project by tinyhouse on Thursday May 06, 2021 @12:27PM (#27065650)
Thanks. I will take a look.
Re:Starting a crypto project by verdverm on Thursday May 06, 2021 @11:56AM (#27065164)
2017 was very different. Crypto type stories frequented the front page with technical marvels. Then a few things happened... 1) we evaluated 2) this scamconomy arose 3) the bubble burst.

I was excited then, when it was new to me, but then I learnt the truth about blockchain

Re:Starting a crypto project by aabhay on Thursday May 06, 2021 @09:48AM (#27063126)
It’s not that different? That’s why the dot com bust happened
Re:Starting a crypto project by grey-area on Thursday May 06, 2021 @09:49AM (#27063155)
It could not be more different, to pick one example from web tech with a similar name:

Cryptocurrencies: Efforts to make useful tools are driven out, speculation and fraud are rife.

Cryptography: Used to secure billions of web transactions every day on the web with very little fraud.

Re:Starting a crypto project by jcbrand on Thursday May 06, 2021 @10:00AM (#27063315)
Cryptography is not web tech.
Re:Starting a crypto project by grey-area on Thursday May 06, 2021 @10:32AM (#27063845)
This website is being served to you using cryptography right now (tls).

I took web tech to mean the technology used to serve the web - the differences with cryptocurrencies are manifold, the principal one being that billions of people use the web every day to perform important functions, compared to cryptocurrencies where most users are simply speculating on prices.

Re:Starting a crypto project by nwiswell on Thursday May 06, 2021 @05:40PM (#27069375)
I think GP's point is this:

1) You cannot have cryptocurrency without the web, so it is web tech.

2) Computational cryptography long predates the web. It would be more accurate to say "the web is cryptography tech", if anything.

Re:Starting a crypto project by grey-area on Friday May 07, 2021 @05:17AM (#27073970)
1) A depending on B does not mean A is part of B (though I'd dispute cryptocurrencies requires the web to function at all, perhaps you're thinking of the internet?).

2) Cryptographic libraries (many relatively recent, e.g. go or rust libraries) are definitely an important part of the web, they're integral to web tech if you define web tech as the tech that powers the web.