One perspective on money is that it's a resource-allocation system. I think more transparent, accountable, reliable resource allocation potentially has enormous social value.

Not if you create a system where it's literally impossible to redistribute wealth. If majority of tokens in a crypto system are controlled under priv-keys owned by a small % of the population we'll literally lock ourselves under the control of those people. Scary thing is that we won't even be able to vote ourselves out of the potential mess because the private keys are mathematically secured. Capitalism is going to have a blast!

Yes, it literally becomes the invisible hand that controlls the freemarket but it no longer free and no longer a market if nobody can get in. Ultimately the value we all get is exchange with eachother at a fair and stable price. The cryptospace could potentially solve this problem when the initial gold rush does some damage. In a way the attention is not bad because more people understand what it is, study it, become savy, vote legislature and deepen the field towards the problems that trully need a solution.

What we want is to basically transfer work/resource tokens and make it resistant against depreciation. Lets add a simplistic example I help someone build a house and receive a fair token for that work. When I need to build a house 20 years later I pass that token, it retains the value such that someone accepts it to do the work I did 20 years prior. Because we’re mentally stuck into an outdated economic model that served ok prior to the digital age our imaginations aren’t creative enough move in the right direction. My thinking is that a direction will emerge, let’s hope it’s as far away from the possibility you talk about.

> What we want is to basically transfer work/resource tokens and make it resistant against depreciation. Lets add a simplistic example I help someone build a house and receive a fair token for that work. When I need to build a house 20 years later I pass that token, it retains the value such that someone accepts it to do the work I did 20 years prior. Because we’re mentally stuck into an outdated economic model that served ok prior to the digital age our imaginations aren’t creative enough move in the right direction. My thinking is that a direction will emerge, let’s hope it’s as far away from the possibility you talk about.

Yes, I think you have the right idea. This is a credit based system, which, I think is fairer because anyone can issue credit denominated in some numeraire and it holds its value over time as long as the issuer can be trusted to “redeem” the credit. The issue with this system is that bootstrapping it is difficult and it’s quite complicated because everyone now needs to become a credit risk/reputation expert!

The way I see it the obvious route is Free, but it will take a while still.

Crypto has no social value? I'm not in the space, but I think crypto has immense social value.

Don't waste your breath dude, HN has become a safe haven for people that like to bury their head in the sand and shit talk crypto. Yeah, anybody that's actually knowledgeable in it know that what they're saying are the same old sad tropes that the news has been training people to repeat verbatim, but they've boxed themselves in and they'll die on this hill.

Where is a place to get a broader perspective on this? I've tried subreddits for some of the projects, the cryptocurrency subreddit, and google and youtube. I have a lot of difficulty cutting through the noise. (My sense is that projects like Ethereum could be extremely valuable but that its value is currently hurt by the speculation on Ether making transactions far too costly. I'd be very interested in getting exposed to the "quality" projects that are out there but it's hard to filter.)

I've found r/ethereum to be pretty level-headed.

> Ethereum could be extremely valuable but that its value is currently hurt by the speculation on Ether making transactions far too costly

FYI the price of ETH does not affect the transaction costs. The fee market is independent. There's solutions to this in place and more being worked on though. The 3 biggest contributors will be EIP 1559 which is meant to level out the fees and make them more predictable, L2 rollups which scale through sidechains that have the each of their blocks confirmed on Ethereum's L1 with proofs, and sharding of L1. Ethereum is currently in a growing pains phase as these L2 options gain more traction/adoption, UX for them improves, and all activity migrates there. The end goal is for a majority of interaction to occur on L2 with L1 being used mainly for a settlement layer.

Huh, I totally thought transaction fees were set in Ether and that’s why the costs are so high (in fiat of course). If that’s not it, what makes the transactions so expensive? Lot of competition for limited throughout?

Yes, it's competition for limited throughput. Especially with the DeFi boom, fees have been bid higher and higher to be sure transactions are included in an immediate block.

Incidentally, if you're looking to keep up with Ethereum in particular, the newsletter Week In Ethereum News is an excellent resource. It's a links-with-descriptve-blurbs kind of thing. It's still a bit of a firehose if you're catching up on the space, but just pick a few items that sound interesting every week. https://weekinethereum.substack.com/

I like https://talesfromthecrypt.libsyn.com/

It's ostensibly a BTC podcast, but it's _really_ about much more including second tier networks, altcoin tech, and individual autonomy.

Otherwise, getting involved in the code itself does seem to be the only avenue I've found for real learning.

There's an O'Reilly book that has you build a blockchain from scratch if you're interested.

I'd welcome other suggestions.

Oh, also Tezos has most of Ethereum's features, but is already Proof of Stake.

It was easier eight years ago, I would just look at Bitcointalk threads and be able to make an evaluation pretty quickly. Small scale, relatively more clued in folks. Now the scale is a problem. There are so many projects I know nothing about.

Nowadays I usually go to /r/cryptocurrency/new for the firehose. I do not aim to read everything, just check in and take some notes. What tends to happen on that subreddit is that some really great posts get made but never hit frontpage because they're crowded out by useless memetic content. But you can take individual great posts and turn those into leads by doing some additional legwork. I don't usually talk to those users(I do not want to read comment thread replies and will completely ignore my Reddit inbox, instead I will monitor the thread if it interests me) but I will sometimes browse their post history.

I would add Andreas Antonopoulos's video, as well as the What Bitcoin Did podcast as good starting points. Also check out the book, Inventing Bitcoin.

What Bitcoin Did is run by a toxic Bitcoin maximalist who is totally clueless about the tech and is only in it for the money.

Check out Bankless and The Daily Gwei.

All the billions that went into it have what to show for? How has it improved anyones life besides making some early enthusiasts and lots of criminals rich? How is society better off?

Lots of grand ideas that went nowhere because they are entirely unrealistic and divorced from reality.

Tell that to the Venezuelans that have been able to move money safely in and out of their country, or the many artists that went from struggling to be able to make a few bucks by selling NFTs.

Indeed. Like a decentralized social network driven not by ads, but likes that gen coins.

PeakD.com

Or a digital currency with the privacy and fungibility of cash.

GetMonero.org

Or an ad free streaming platform.

Odysee.com

I would strongly argue that crypto does present genuine value to the world...