Bitcoin followed this pattern for a while. But then at some point it started to regress on that axis. You could no longer buy a pizza with it, you could no longer mine it, and it got too flooded by scammers to use safely. There's nothing to really DO with blockchain unless you buy into the subculture. That's very different from early internet, early web, early radio, you name it.

“Why did it regress” is much less interesting than “why did anyone ever fall for this?”

What's interesting to me is that the original idea was clearly brilliant, but never found any of those lateral steps. It's kind of a string theory for programmers now.

First, the underpinnings of Bitcoin are ideological, namely in Austrian economics. This means that any change that caused any inflation would be socially resisted.

Second, most of the issues with Bitcoin stem from the lack of a central authority to do things like chargebacks and handle conflict resolution. It is not possible to solve many of the issues of Bitcoin without a central authority, and that was not going to happen for obvious reasons.

As soon as it claimed to be money, then it was all about the money. If you look at early BitcoinTalk, you'll see a pile of scams that are extremely similar to the jargon still used in crypto to this day - the scammers got in very early indeed.

I hear that darknet markets tend to use cryptocoins. Which while probably mostly illegal, isn't a Ponzi scheme and isn't (necessarily, depending on what's being sold) fraud.

Only if you have a wildly incorrect view of what a blockchain is.

Merkle trees are part of a blockchain, but they are not blockchains on their own. What you’re missing here is that blockchains also include something to determine which branch is the correct one, to protect against double spend attacks. This is why “blockchain” gets a different name rather than just being called Merkle trees.

I'm pretty sure that if I posted a fork of Linux somewhere, approximately everyone would know that it's not the correct one.

I thought that Monero at least served some purpose as a currency even if it goes against the wishes of some countries' governments. The fact that there are people that talk down cryptocurrencies that are actually being used as a currency really put things into perspective.

It's just multi level marketing schemes all the way down.

Amusingly enough the darknet use of crypto may only be possible because of the Ponzi-beginnings. Criminals are unlikely to accept Pokémons as currency until after they see others doing it.

The actual interesting and novel thing about crypto-coins was solving the "trust problem" of a distributed ledger. But this solution, to be honest, is quite clumsy: PoW. But nobody ever found a better solution until now. Any other proposal is kind of centralized somewhere.

The question that needs to be asked is now "Do we really want, or even need, a fully decentralized 'value moving system'"?

In a world where you could ultimately trust someone else the answer would be clearly "no".

But when there is on thing to learn about humans than it's "never ever trust someone ultimately as you're going to be scammed by those people eventually". Just look at what government do around the globe…

As long as this fact doesn't change (and it won't change until we create a new species of intelligent beings, better than us) there will be room for something like BitCoin. And as those are distributed systems there even doesn't need to be any agreement on that point.

And then there is what we do know about what happens in practice:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/22/majority-of-bitcoin-trading-...

https://www.theregister.com/2018/11/30/blockchain_study_find...

"We found a proliferation of press releases, white papers, and persuasively written articles," Burg et al wrote on Thursday. "However, we found no documentation or evidence of the results blockchain was purported to have achieved in these claims. We also did not find lessons learned or practical insights, as are available for other technologies in development."

https://theintercept.com/2021/03/24/andrew-cuomo-covid-ibm-b...

"Blockchains are typically public, their contents transparent to anyone with an internet connection, but the one behind Excelsior Pass will be private, meaning only parties sanctioned by IBM will be able to check the contents."

But the blockchain is the protocol for updating the information where other players aren't trusted. As soon as any "party" can be "sanctioned to be able" there's just no need for blockchain at all. It's just selling of snake oil, and yes, IBM is indeed doing it.

Now who'd expect that? The technology company uses the hyped technologies to sell their services and products, even if the said technologies don't make the products any better?

Of course, blockchain promoters would tell you that "there will be something else, comes Really Soon (tm) which won't use "proof of work"."

One can more efficiently use public key cryptography, hashing and signing without the blockchain for any other problem than "implementing bitcoin."

The problem is that delivering AR with enough fidelity to fool the eye is capital-H Hard. Michael Abrash had a good series of blog posts on this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science) An old algorithm used for sharding big-data databases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(algorithm) A simplified version of paxos.

http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/losa:stellar-ins... The new paper about SCP which allows replication with subjective notions of trust (no central participant-stake list like paxos/raft).

ps: actually i remove "chained" from the idea. If you want to keep the whole authenticated linked-list thing and do it right you'll end up somewhere near https://irmin.org/ (a generalization of git), which is very useful, but doesn't tackle the "strong decentralized commit". You'll probably want to either centrally manage the "lastest-hash(s)" (like git is usually done), or pair it with a state-machine replication protocol. In that last case it may seem useless to use the chained thing if you already have a real replication protocol, but it is much like using public-key crypto for encrypting small ephemeral symmetric keys and encrypting actual data with symmetric crypto: it's an optimization.

Of course, PoS like Ethereum's takes much inspiration from byzantine paxos. But I wouldn't call this a solve problem, and crypto has innovated in this space. We can just debate whether or not the innovation has been worthwhile ;).

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~lorenzo/papers/fab.pdf

So... like git?

And that algorithm is indeed novel! It also has a lot of drawbacks that ultimately makes the whole system not worth the trouble.

This is gold, I'm gonna steal it

Cryptocurrency seems like that for endless numbers of tech nerds. It’s even worse than the impossible shape they were going to use on the Borg since it plugs right into humanity’s biggest cognitive vulnerability: gambling.

Maybe it’s a weapon sent by aliens to make halt our technological progress. 25 years from now cryptocurrency will have soaked up all surplus capital and locked it into a Ponzi and all our best minds will be churning out increasingly Byzantine coin hacks. Then the hypervelocity impactors start arriving…

Curious what you landed on, though.

The NFTs that just point to a painting or a youtube video, I don't think so. They don't do anything and I don't think owning them will be valuable.

The NFTs of, like, NBA clips I can sort of understand as digital trading cards. Being purely digital I think they're inferior to the baseball cards I collected as a kid, but I can kinda see it. But 1) they don't need a blockchain; a public database would probably work better for everyone and 2) I don't think sports trading cards are generally a good investment.

There's something maybe interesting in the "creator economy" angle where like a new podcaster auctions off NFTs of the episodes to early fans, who then become invested in its success. If the show takes off, newly minted NFTs will go for more and more money benefitting the creator and the secondary market will appreciate for early supporters. To be clear, I don't think this is actually a good idea for a lot of reasons... but it's interesting.

All the games and pets and racehorses seem like junk.

Like, sure, NFTs hypothetically make it so that ownership of Top Shots can persist regardless of whether the company that operates it survives. But would the actual Flow blockchain survive the demise of Dapper Labs? I kind of doubt it. And where would the Top Shots I supposedly own continue to be hosted? It's effectively just a centralized marketplace.

I've tried to think about what would truly be unique and interesting about decentralized NFTs, and to me, they make sense if they hold credibility independent of any producer. So, something like a tradable auth role that is respected in many spaces. Kind of like an identity, except that I think the concept of a role makes a bit more sense as something that people can trade. Consider it to be like an event ticket that is respected in an entire ecosystem of different companies.

To me, that's where it starts to enable something that's unlike what's existed before, but it's still hard for me to imagine a real use case. And that's core of the problem of the crypto world: the technology solves problems that don't map on to existing B2B or B2C services. It's literally a solution in search of a problem.

They don't confer copyright or licensing or anything at all other than a URL. This means it would be illegal to build a site that displays such content, and it would get instantly DMCA'd into oblivion.

My issuing an NFT of the Mona Lisa is basically me grabbing a museum map from the Louvre, circling the Mona Lisa on it, signing my name, then selling that map to you for big money. The map doesn't given you a license to display the Mona Lisa. It's just a set of instructions re: how to find it alongside my signature. If they move the painting to a new location, it gets stolen, destroyed, or the Louvre is shut down - well, tough. And anyone can do it, with any map of the Louvre.

> Consider it to be like an event ticket that is respected in an entire ecosystem of different companies.

Event tickets have one issuer and one point of redemption. Generally, Ticketmaster is on both sides (they own the issuance via Ticketmaster and they own the redemption side - the venues - via Live Nation). It's not in their interest as a business to relinquish even the tinies bit of control.

Agreed on the unlikelihood of NFTs supplanting event tickets. I'm just speculating on the type of novel product/ecosystem the technology enables. But building a compelling experience around this concept is a whole other challenge. It remains to be seen whether someone eventually does. Even if that happens, it doesn't mean we're talking about an entire new market of significance.

I guess I'd just say absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, when it comes to the utility, but a level of outside-the-box thinking is required that no one's motivated to do when you can simply mint NFTs of URLs and sell them for absurd sums of money.

Also, consider that in NFTs, the only one selling an NFT to the Mona Lisa is Leonardo.

No. Copyright must be explicitly assigned.

> Also, consider that in NFTs, the only one selling an NFT to the Mona Lisa is Leonardo.

Nah anyone can do it any time.

No one is talking about assigning copyright. The question is about a license to display the content on a website. I am fairly certain you have heard of non-verbal contracts before. For example, here is what the UK government has to say about an implied copyright license:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/license-sell-or-market-your-copy...

> Nah anyone can do it any time.

Anyone can also sell a signature of Clooney. And yet no one does, nor would anyone buy it. This is not something that plays into a serious analysis of the NFT space, and so I am not sure why you would want to find it interesting to talk about.

Agreed that the artificial scarcity is a tell that there's not a particularly impressive amount of innovation.

[1] https://anchor.fm/aviv-milner

Sologenic DEX [1] is an modern UI for a DEX to trade. Cutting out the middlemen was once a key point of p2p and decentral systems. It was kinda lost with all the non tech savvy people storming the crypto space.

[1] https://www.sologenic.com/ecosystem/sologenic-decentralized-... (The DEX runs on the XRPL, Manticore Securities AS(the company behind sologenic) has no control over it)

What do you mean by saying people fell for "this"? I assume you mean it's a scam but I will wait for your reply.

For a payments system, the fact that all transactions are final is pretty bad. I'd say this, by itself, makes the system unusable in the real world.

That a transaction is final is not a flaw but one of the main features.

I don't use dispute resolution unless someone actually stole my credit card number like when my card info was jacked at a gas pump one time. Credit cards are quite insecure and we still have to type in all our personal info online every single transaction which is dangerous and dumb and makes the whole system vulnerable to credit card fraud in a way that crypto isn't. When you use crypto you simply sign a transaction message, you don't have to give away your private keys to make the transaction occur.

That's just what humans do to each other. New tech is always like this when there are gains to be made.

Some folks look at the trend that central banks have been on and the creep of financial surveillance and think purposefully going backward in some areas isn't silly at all.

In the end, it's software you don't have to use. Nobody is forcing anyone to opt in, right (you know, like the credit bureaus who in America force you to opt in if you intend to... I dunno, participate in the economy in a meaningful way)?

Second, adoption is way up and btc is only one cryptocurrency. It gets first-mover advantage in this market (unfairly, probably) and so continues to be a bellwether despite the fact that it is a relative dinosaur, technology wise. I'm fine with that, personally, despite the problems with the technology.

That you haven't adopted the tech doesn't mean that adoption is failing, you know. There are more users every year (this is difficult to pin down for obvious & good reasons, but the indicators are solid) and no technology with millions of users globally, including institutional adopters, can be said to be failing.

Further, to call any payments technology 'mildly popular' which safeguards USD 1.5-2.5 trillion (total cryptocurrency market cap, BTC accounting for over 760 billion alone, despite the recent corrections) in deflationary wealth undermines your argument to the point of bad faith. Is the cryptocurrency market overheated and full of nonsense? Of course. But let's do the analyses with level heads at least.

Humans have been using credit systems for millennia. The implication that in the olden days people only walked around with bits of gold in their pockets is a bit of “retconning.”

This article includes some interesting tidbits: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/05/the-invention-...

Paper currency is a couple millenia older than the printing press, using woodlblock printing.

If we're talking specifically about credit cards, the credit card went from new invention to ubiquity in a couple of decades. But I think that's too narrow a scope to look at, to be honest.

Early credit systems did not depend upon the printing press; think of the widespread use of tally sticks in medieval Europe to enable illiterate low-technology credit systems.

It's really hard to approach this anthropologically, IMO, because so many other variables change. Less complex economies do fine with "local communism" and person-to-person debt, but it's hard to imagine using such a thing to order from Amazon. Conversely, coinage historically was useful if you had to exchange with someone with whom you didn't have a personal relationship (say, you're traveling to a faraway land and you can't just provide an IOU), but that's somewhat obsolete now.

I guess my conclusion would be that these historical analogies don't shed a lot of light.

https://www.amazon.com/History-Money-Jack-Weatherford/dp/060...

In Europe credit cards are not very common, and debit card transactions are often not reversible.

A generalisation like this is no better than the frequent occurrence of HNers posting articles headlined with "the nation" which mean "the USA".

Anyone who has worked with payment processing can tell you how rare debit card chargebacks are, this is because they’re usually vastly more difficult.

And no, your comment on Ethereum is about 4 years outdated.

The fundamental issue is that creating scalable, cheap credit infrastructure for mass economic activity is fundamentally in opposition with creating an investment that will continually gain in value. You see this really clearly in Ethereum, where’s gas fees can be exceptionally high compared to traditional financial institutions.

Or https://compound.finance/ also a great project.

Ethereum's gas fees have nothing to do with the price of the base asset: it has to do with limited block size availability. When the network is congested, block size is limited and this causes transactions to be bid up in an auction format to get in first.

This is one of the costs of decentralization. However, recent advances in Zero Knowledge Proof cryptography has paved a path for Ethereum to take to get to VISA scale and beyond and be able to process 200K transactions per second (at pennies or less per tx): see https://zksync.io/ and https://starkware.co/.

There are already a large number of crypto projects partnering with existing businesses to address real problems. I don't see a minority ideology standing in the way of this.

Here's various businesses running oracles for smart contracts including Deutsch Telecom: https://chain.link/ecosystem/data-providers

Here's Ernst & Young's take on the technology: https://www.ey.com/en_us/blockchain

They are not. They're offering a pre-paid card that users can top up with their crypto.com wallets. [1]

The Crypto.com Visa Card is a prepaid card. Broadly speaking, prepaid cards are the same as debit cards. The difference is that debit cards are linked to your bank account, but prepaid cards need to be topped up. In our case, you can top up using bank account transfers, other credit/debit cards, or cryptocurrency.

And Deutsch Telecom isn't using a blockchain either. They're selling data to a company that then puts the data on a blockchain. That's not using a blockchain.

[1] https://crypto.com/cards

And Visa clearly said: that Anchorage will be its “digital asset settlement agent” and that it will “integrate [its] treasury systems with Anchorage.”

“After further testing and additional conversations with clients, partners and members of the regulatory community, we hope to launch this capability for other partners in the year ahead,” Visa said in a blog post about the news.

Read it from their official press release, a couple times: https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.rele...

Multisig escrow is also better in every way if people want to involve a third party in case of a dispute

SWIFT international wires do cost the DI more, but not several orders of magnitude more. I don't happen to know that number off hand.

Some retail banks charge a lot for wires because they can - people don't use them frequently (as to your point its not what people want most of the time) and usually only for bigger purchases so the fee matters less.

However, if this is something you do more often, banks offer steep, steep discounts over sticker.

And BTW no we dont need bitcoin for this at all its depreciated tech. But other DLT can be very usefully. There is a reason CBDCs are a huge topic in global finance.

With technology getting faster, I regret not mining a few coins.

I even bought the sound cards?

A life if regrets because I didn't follow my gut feelings, or let people sway my decisions?

(Would I invest in Bitcoin now. Hell no, but years ago yes. It will deflate, along with NTF's, and the stock market soon.)

Not be able to reverse transaction is not a feature, it's a fundamental flaw. There is absolutely no advantage to the consumer or the producer to have all transactions immediately permanent.

The rest of your comment reveals your bias: You don't really care about it working technologically, you just wish you had made money on it.

(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multisignature

The slow transition away from “mass adoption soon!” is extremely entertaining to me.

Why, pray tell, for a currency would developers matter more than end users?

Many people are certainly buying in to crypto with the intent of selling it later at a profit. But that’s unrelated from its utility.

Usage as in number of network participants. People investing time, energy, risk into the system. Miners, traders, validators, second layer operators. Similar to members of facebook, servers in the internet. Price as in market price. And I'm only talking Bitcoin here.

It'd be like if the number of Facebook accounts kept rising, but hardly anyone posts content anymore. If I were a Facebook investor, that would worry me.

First I've heard of this. Do you have more information?

And the idea that miners have a god-given right to make $100 per transaction, $40m per day, and therefore if the mining reward halves, the price of BTC must inevitably double, is obviously preposterous.

Note, not speculation in Bitcoin, usage of it as an actual currency.

I agree with you. Both versions of this argument have to stop in favor of actual discussion (which, it seems, there is a good amount of in this thread)

Most technology companies should hold it on their balance sheets and employ a contributor.

Complaining about nothing to do on Bitcoin feels like complaining how empty the gopher server are after everyone’s moved onto the web.

The reason is that blockchain can only offer its trustless, decentralized and permissionless guarantees to things that are wholly representable on-chain. As soon as you try and sync it with the real world, the real world is the source of truth and the chain representation is meaningless.

Further, by boat anchoring solutions to the fundamental inefficiencies of blockchain, you leave your chain solutions at a material disadvantage to centralized, permissioned solutions anyways. This creates huge adverse selection bias, leaving only the criminals and scammers using it.

Concrete example: Sia has 800TB of storage - total! - in spite of an $800M market cap and millions spent on R&D. You could achieve the same result with a half of a 1U rack of hard drives and $40,000 - or a few bucks on AWS. Why? Because why on earth would anyone use it?

On the other hand, Chia has 1.5 exabytes of wasted hard drive capacity loaded up with bingo cards lol.

This is crypto.

DeFi is particularly fun, it's basically just decentralized 2008, a way to extend way too much leverage to people who simply should not have it, in exchange for fanciful 3-digit percentage APR to lenders.

It's all a damn mess.

I think what's being lost in this discussion, since almost no one posting here is either passingly familiar with the past decade of crypto-economic research, or with the current state of the art in "crypto" technology (almost none of which revolves around or even involves Bitcoin these days). Almost all of the promising new networks provide at least 1000X transaction throughput at 1000X+ transaction efficiency while retaining decent Nakamoto coefficients and allowing some level of computation ("smart contract") and composability. (Yes there is also plenty of useless stupid stuff that sadly is a huge waste of resources, but hey, we survived Dotcom Bubble. It's just part of the process.)

I don't begrudge anyone who doesn't see the potential there, just as I don't worry about anyone who might have said that the Internet's impact would be no greater than the fax machine (in fact, a single Nobel laureate chimed in early on to both of these sentiments) - whether this turns out to be true will depend largely on the people who choose to build their vision and prove people wrong... or not.

Also, there's no question it's all a damn mess, but much more broadly than crypto.

It solves a technical problem - the byzantine generals problem - but does it solve a problem people have? I don’t know anyone who’s had the Byzantine generals problem personally.

Having said all that, I still can't figure out what the hell to do in the DeFi world. It seems like all I can do is lend my assets to people who also have nothing to do besides speculate or themselves lend their assets to other speculators. I can't figure out anything to do that pushes out of the speculative bubble in any way. Maybe you can help me?

You can read some of their public reports here: https://blog.chainalysis.com/?tab=articles-tab

Bitcoin by design only has a fixed number of coins available, eventually the miners will have mined them all. It has the same limitation that gold has and basing an economy on it will stunt its growth.

A counter-position from the Austrian/Chicago school is that supercharging growth drives malinvestment, and they can't be entirely wrong about that - I've seen tons of dumb money flow into dodgy companies during tech booms.

Inflation incentivizes investment because you are going to lose 2% per annum if you don't.

Fiat offers you the maximum flexibility because you can back your personal economy any way you want - if you want to back it with gold, just buy some. If you want to back it with crypto, bless your heart, buy some.

This is a false narrative.

Wealth is a verb, not a noun. The wealth of nations is measured in how much they do, not how much they have.

The US arguably defeated the USSR via looser monetary policy. China is now doing the same to the US.

Interest rates are low because everyone is saving, nobody is borrowing, nobody is investing.

Bitcoin is limited by the block size and the lack of working L2 solutions (lightning is permanently broken).

But other currencies, like BCH don't have that problem, and can easily represent the whole US economy.

You might have difficulty measuring out two atoms of gold to change hands, but that's dwarfed by the difficulty in measuring out two Satoshis - given that they aren't a physical thing at all. So, if you can keep track of it with Satoshis, why couldn't you keep track of it with gold atoms?

That is, if your position is "Bitcoin isn't limited like gold because of Satoshis" then the same argument works equally well for gold with atoms, doesn't it?

That is, gold can't represent the entire economy because nobody would pay so much for a gram of gold, but why would they then pay that much for a quanity of the even less physical Bitcoin?

90% of all bitcoin ever have already been mined. If your solution to the limited number of bitcoins is rampant deflation you probably don't have a viable currency

A small amount of inflation is an incentive to find productive uses for capital. Deflation rewards a kind of rentier class who own capital but don't do anything with it.

Yet, people keep buying computers. Why?

I would argue deflation has been the most significant driver of the IT industry in the last 30 years and in turn has been one of the greatest drivers of prosperity in that same period. As computers become cheaper, more people can afford more them and more value is added to society.

On the other side you have inflation that kills savings. And since most people save with a goal in mind, not because it's fun and exciting, the higher the inflation, the longer they will have to save before they reach that goal.

The majority of wealth is owned by the top 5%. Are they really spending a significant fraction of that wealth on computers? Deflation is never about what people buy, it's what they keep.

>I would argue deflation has been the most significant driver of the IT industry in the last 30 years

No it hasn't. The IT sector drives deflation and there is nothing wrong with productivity improvements. You just got cause and effect backwards.

>and in turn has been one of the greatest drivers of prosperity in that same period. As computers become cheaper, more people can afford more them and more value is added to society.

Inflation increases future incomes. If computers cost the same but you get higher salaries that's a good thing.

Deflation is good. Every wage earner becomes more wealthy as their rate of pay buys more. Sticky wages arent a problem with deflationary money. Hell, at least half the complaints about the modern economy are the result of inflation. But, no, deflation would utterly destroy the economy.

If you want to change the amount of wealth low-income earners have, stop focusing on the units. This is not JPow's fault, it's a job for congress - it's social and fiscal policy not monetary policy. This is just a quixotic quest against the wrong opponent.

If you want to help low-income folks, advocate for unions (so labor can push back against capital), advocate for wealth taxes, higher marginal taxes for the rich, minimum wage indexed to inflation, a strong social safety net and national zoning laws to stop metros from preventing adding enough housing supply to meet demand. Things that would help.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/10/09/measured-in...

The author suggests you cannot measure inflation except by dividing by the spot price of gold. This is false, and why we have the CPI.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...

You will get wage cuts because it becomes harder to employ you at your currency salary or you just get fired. If you can't find a job, deflation will have made your life a lot worse. You are also incentivized to stick with your first job because future jobs will pay less than past jobs. Basically you hope you build a stash of cash in your 20s because your potential to earn money shrinks with every single year but your wealth gains in value from doing nothing.

We are running into that problem with Bitcoin and land. Do you really think that if you signed a contract to get paid 10 BTC per year in 2017 (when it was $20k) that you will still get 10 BTC today? (at $38k). No, you will get 5 BTC this year.

>Hell, at least half the complaints about the modern economy are the result of inflation

Pretty much all of the complaints about the modern economy are about inadequate attempts to fight off deflation. The Fed has reached a point where it cannot do anything to fight off deflation, it takes a pandemic to fight off deflation, that's how bad the situation is.

Just take a look at Japan, they have deflation and nobody is jealous of their economy.

Income is not the same as wealth. Savers become wealthier, debtors (such as anyone with a mortgage) lose wealth.

> Sticky wages arent a problem with deflationary money.

Um, what? Your last sentence was all about how deflationary money guarantees wage earners increasing pay in real terms. That makes the sticky wages problem much worse.

At the moment our economies grow because we can print more money ... and of course most national/reserve banks are careful to not print so much currency that inflation becomes an issue, just enough to cover the economic growth.

Gold didn’t have a rep as the hub of black market transactions before bitcoin.

I’d put that deflationary crash right at the point you mention. I remember it. Bitcoin ran up to crazy levels in 2017 while it was simultaneously abandoned, which is what a deflationary currency collapse looks like.

Bitcoin’s designer(s) were brilliant cryptographers but crank economists. There’s a reason nobody takes that kind of superficial pop Austrianism seriously. It would be possible to design a viable cryptocurrency but it won’t happen until the current crop of cranks and scammers goes away. Right now anything actually workable in the space is tainted by the nonsense.

Bitcoin "regressed" (really, specialized) because it got so big that it became speculators' favorite, which made it too expensive for anyone but speculators to interact with. Then, other cryptocurrencies that aren't so expensive to move around were created, and people who wanted to use cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange moved to using those instead. So now the ecosystem supports two applications (investment, exchange) using different tools specialized to those purposes, each better at that thing than a single cryptocurrency trying to "do it all" would be.

Which is, y'know, also the story of the Internet.

I have bought a lot of pizzas with BTC (and other cryptocurrencies), as the local food ordering platform accepts it. Worked grear, but at some point the crypto payment processor started requiring KYC. I'm not gonna upload my passport to pay for pizza. I dont know if this problem is because of crypto or excessive regulation.

If I wanted to be more optimistic I would look at the level of adoption today as insane compared to 5y ago.

And, yeah, 13 years after the internet's invention was 01982; not only couldn't you get so much as a weather report online, much less IRC, but many of the early interesting experiments like NLS at SRI had shut down, and more and more places were disabling guest access to their hosts — you couldn't run so much as a game of ADVENT without getting a username. And a password. Things were seriously regressing. The only people you could talk to on the internet were other people who really bought into the subculture, of which there were a few tens of thousands.

So why does Bitcoin have tens of millions of users 13 years after its inception, instead of only tens of thousands like the internet?

If you live in a country with a highly functional banking system and no kleptocracy, Bitcoin is probably a bit puzzling unless you have family in Cuba. But it’s not puzzling at all for those of us who live somewhere in the middle of the broad spectrum between Switzerland and Somalia, because most places have a little kleptocracy. Argentina is a stable democracy, far from being “a failed state,”† but if you want to send US$500 abroad via non-Bitcoin means it’s basically impossible, and the only broadly available savings vehicle is real estate (“ahorrar en ladrillos”), which of course grossly inflates real-estate prices, with a substantial part of the capital city occupied by empty apartments someone bought “as an investment”. Historically, Argentines have saved by buying dollars, but that’s limited to US$200 a month now, and then only if you have a non-under-the-table job (about a third of total employment is under the table):

https://www.ambito.com/finanzas/dolares/cronologia-del-cepo-...

You can see that in September 02019 when this measure was imposed the price of a dollar was AR$63.50; now it’s AR$155. So whatever savings you had in pesos in 02019 have lost 59% of their value to peso devaluation.

In 02001 a lot of Argentines had saved dollars in their dollar-denominated bank accounts. This did not preserve their savings through the financial crisis that year; the cash-strapped government limited withdrawals to a trickle, then converted dollar deposits to pesos at a one-to-one rate, then released the exchange-rate peg, at which point peso went overnight from being worth US$1 to being worth US$0.25 before settling at about US$0.31 for the next few years. The US did something similar in 01933.

Some might suggest using “alternatives to banks like credit unions where customers—as owners—hold more power,” but Credicoop depositors suffered the same two-thirds confiscation of savings as depositors in for-profit banks. And they pay the same 3% tax on bank transactions including checks. That’s more than a fast Bitcoin transaction fee of US$15 for transactions over US$500.

But we’re not a failed state. There are no gangs of bandits roving the streets in Argentine cities (though there are some pretty bad slums where you’ll get robbed if you wander in without knowing anybody). Courts, free public hospitals, and roads continue to function, though there are more potholes than a year ago. Argentine infant mortality is 10 per 1000 live births, down from almost 20 in the late 01990s and the same as the late 01980s in the US; life expectancy at birth is 77 years, worse than Switzerland’s 84, but the same as China and Hungary, and better than Saudi or Mexico. (Somalia is 54.)

Most of the world is worse off than Argentina, although not necessarily in such a statistically transparent fashion. About one fourth of the people in the world are unbanked, 51% here in Argentina; even advanced countries like Russia, Hungary, and Uruguay have roughly a quarter of the population unbanked:

https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/worlds-most-...

And if your family lives in a country like Iran or Venezuela subject to US sanctions, and you live in the US? Good luck sending them an ACH, instant or otherwise!‡ It’s well known that Bitcoin is very popular in Venezuela, which kind of is a failed state, so one of the Venezuelan governments is trying to tax Bitcoin remittances at 15%.

https://archive.fo/ZRXzS

Bitcoin handles a few billion dollars per year in such remittances. This might seem like a trivial amount of money to someone in a rich country, but in poor countries, it’s enough to keep several million people alive.

Even in the US, it’s common for the police to confiscate large amounts of paper currency just because they can (“civil forfeiture”); US bank accounts are probably fine for US$100K but probably somewhat risky for US$10M if the bank thinks you don’t seem like the kind of person who ought to have it. US$10M in US$100 bills fits in a box you can wheel around on a dolly, but Bitcoin is a lot more practical. (And of course US$10M in dollar bills loses about US$200k per year to inflation.)

Transaction fees are usually high enough that you wouldn’t want to use Bitcoin to pay for a can of Red Bull or even a restaurant dinner. But it’s extremely practical as an alternative to Western Union or US$100 bills or gold, even with the current very high transaction fees. At the moment, the Bitcoin transaction fee is very low—the median Bitcoin transaction fee in the last block was 0.00678 millibitcoins, which is US$0.25:

https://btc.com/0000000000000000000778ef382c1697706e34634696...

Three months ago it was at what I think of as a more normal rate of 0.31 millibitcoins, US$11, which is lower than the 3.4% spread you’d pay to a jeweler or black-market money changer for transactions over US$350:

https://btc.com/00000000000000000000476ab57eea9be8ada36e2680...

So, Bitcoin doesn’t have to be a cypherpunk utopia to be a big improvement on the status quo ante. For those of you living in stable countries where your worries are things like “instant and extremely low-fee ACHs” and “decentralized utopia”, this may be very confusing, but try to remember that most of the world lives in places with much more pressing concerns, concerns that Bitcoin helps a lot with. And you may live there too, soon—the loyal subjects of Kaiser Wilhelm in 01913 certainly didn’t expect that in 15 years they’d be in the middle of a hyperinflation episode that remains legendary a century later.

I think that, by providing workarounds to the people who need them, cryptocurrencies probably not only ameliorate the most immediate and pressing concerns of poor parts of the population like Venezuelan immigrants, but probably also adjust the power balance in a more liberal and democratic direction. This will improve the chance of those concerns being ameliorated by public policy over the next decades as well. But it's hard to tell what will really happen. The potential disaster scenario is that, by making most taxation impossible, cryptocurrencies destroy the modern welfare state without providing anything to replace it. So the public hospitals close, the enormous police force starts to support itself by extracting tribute, and the infrastructure decays. Pretty similar to what's happened in the US over the last 50 years, in fact, only more so.

However, at this point I think the modern welfare state is already doing a good enough job of destroying itself without any significant help from cryptocurrencies—as evidence, I can point to Maduro, Macri, Bolsonaro, Trump, and Brexit, and metonymically to the social changes they betoken. So at this point I'm more worried about cushioning the collapse than preventing it.

(I posted an earlier version of this a couple of months ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26654767.)

____

† We’ve remained democratic since 01983, electing presidents from three different political parties (UCR, PJ, and PRO), and there’s no serious insurgency. It’s the economy and government policy that are ruinously unstable, to a point that seems satirical to anyone accustomed to the US, but is lamentably common worldwide. Rich people sometimes say they don't know of legitimate uses of Bitcoin outside of “failed states”.

‡ Family remittances are specifically exempted from the US sanctions on Iran, but good luck finding a US bank that’s willing and able to take that risk: https://www.wiggin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/26580_advi...

Safeguarding hard physical cash is something most everyone, old and young, technically literate or technically illiterate, poor or rich, intrinsically knows how to do. And when it is stolen or lost, there are viable approaches to pursue with favorable probabilities of a happy resolution: tell a police cop to see if they can catch the thief using detective work, you could try looking around if you think you might have misplaced it, etc.

With BTC on the other hand, ensuring your wallet isn't had by committed and technically proficient bad-actors or that your wealth isn't all erased in the blink of an eye with a hdd crash or a distressed acquaintance wiping your data away, you can't expect normal people to be up to the task of combatting all of this. And retrieving stolen BTCs from bad-actors living a continent away is a task that police cops are not up to doing or even the slightest bit capable of. You are a really smart guy kragen, I'm sure you won't forget your computer's password one day or have your wallet compromised, but someone like my mom or grandma would, and the thought that simple mistakes and viruses and computer illiteracy could and probably would be the thing that leaves someone's wealth irretrievably erased without much avenue of recourse saddens me, and makes me wish that people in our profession who understand this would stop encouraging its usage.

I come from a nation that ranks lower than Argentina in stability. My family went through this very dance of receiving money from abroad and having to go to WU to get it. The risk of a bad accident happening is infinitesimally small in that than with BTC.

With either banks or Bitcoin, you can hedge your risks by converting to fiat currencies. But with fiat currencies, you can hedge your risk by converting (partly) to Bitcoin.

So maybe you should buy your grandma a Trezor. What country does she live in?

In comparison to getting your wallet compromised by viruses searching for it (and they will probably become more aggressive and adept as BTC usage increases), the chance of this happening I feel is exceedingly low. And avenues of recourse exist: there are clear leads to follow on for an investigative team.

> I've had my bank ATM card cloned by a skimmer on an ATM while I was traveling overseas

I know that my credit card covers me for this and I would get my money back if such a thing were to happen to me.

> I've had WU give me ridiculously unfavorable exchange rates, and there was nothing I could do about it

And BTC transaction fees are ever-increasing. And so is its environmental cost.

My grandma lives in .pk. I fear she would not be capable of understanding the concept of BTC or Trezor as she can barely understand how a TV remote works. She does very much grok the concept of cash money though, and is quite fond of exercising her freedom with it.

The second time, I explained it, they didn't get it. The third time, I sat them down, and made them learn how to run full nodes, run a few commands on the command line, and use bitcoin. Western Union is certainly not guaranteed, nor tyranny proof. If the governments of Argentina or Pakistan need the USD bad enough, they will every dollar Western Union is holding for recipients. To keep the story quiet and the money flowing in, they may imprison the recipients and their families. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

But that money isn't free, you may for it through higher merchant fees and lower bank interest rates.

Currency controls are actually preventing the recovery of the country. They are a short term fix for a short term problem but they create long term problems in the process and those long term problems are definitively the worse poison.

I've already addressed your point about governmental change.

The reality is that it's just another means for the wealthy (and criminals) to evade currency controls.

How do you turn your Bitcoin into food, housing, utilities, and other necessities?

> And, yeah, 13 years after the internet's invention was 01982

The Internet was not available to virtually anyone in 1982 much less 1969. Nor was the ARPANET of 1969 even remotely similar to the Internet. TCP came about in 1974. IPv4 in 1982.

> So why does Bitcoin have tens of millions of users

It doesn't. It has a lot of speculators, and a handful of users. And no one knows or could possibly know how many there are.

etc.

I sell it for dollars to people in person; some of the dollars I have to change into Argentine pesos before I can spend them. Isn't that how everybody does it?

> The Internet was not available to virtually anyone in 1982 much less 1969

It was available to almost anyone who knew someone who had access, which is the same situation as Bitcoin. Precisely what Maciej is complaining about is that so little of the economy is hooked up to Bitcoin is that most of us can't buy a pizza with it without going through intermediaries.

> Nor was the ARPANET of 1969 even remotely similar to the Internet

It was remotely similar; it provided telnet over a packet-switched network, with routing. You could argue that substantial technical changes happened in Bitcoin over the last 13 years, too. Maciej did, in fact, make that argument: he pointed out in particular the dramatic shift to centralized intermediaries like Coinbase (the ANS.NET of Bitcoin?) and from CPU mining to GPU, FPGA, and then ASIC mining, as well as the proliferation of alternative cryptocurrencies. We could also mention segwit, the BCH schism, Lightning, BIP39 and Electrum seed phrases, and lightweight clients like Electrum. Those changes are not over yet. So the situations are in fact quite closely parallel.

No, most people just spend their currency directly on the things they need to purchase, actually.

> It was available to almost anyone who knew someone who had access

That's not even remotely true, and is also a tiny number of people.

> It was remotely similar

But... it wasn't. As I already have shown.

The ARPANET, then the Internet, have all gone through steady evolution. It has not spent 13 years stagnant or regressing in terms of either design or use.

Just because you read somewhere that "ARPANET was the predecessor of the Internet" does not mean that ARPANET was the Internet.

If you care to see, it’s in my comment history not long ago. And the thread is fascinating because at best the replies just cherry pick and do semantic tricks like this.

Crypto has a wealth of interesting uses. Tech company co-ops, incentivizing content curation, new and organic stock distribution mechanisms for open source projects, and of course the giant one of providing a far better investment and transfer vehicle to the non-first world countries.

I mean, I can totally see the arguments that it is wasteful, or a bubble, overhyped, and not reaching its potential. But the ones who say it has no or next to no uses are in my opinion on the same plane as Krugmans “the internet will be less useful than the fax machine” or the classic Slashdot iPod “less space than a nomad” comment. It may take even 20 years to prove it, IMO that’s not unreasonable, but it will be claim chowder I’ll be happy to revisit.

If proof of stake works out, there’s no doubt the next Google will be a crypto company that gives revenue back to the user base to incentive good contribution. Content sites absolutely will be totally disrupted. Well look back at writing reviews for the Yelps and Googles as being anachronistic, “why did we used to give all this content to the largest company in the world for free”. Instead, a crypto-based Yelp or Reddit that used a coin and distributed it fairly in relation to contribution would absolutely blow up.

I think VC is also better done with coins in general. Take any traditional tech company that has nothing to do with crypto and just change one thing: instead of paying early adopters who help the platform grow $150 bucks, which is nothing, pay them in what is essentially a micro-dose of stock. That’s a 10x more incentivized early adopter because they actually could make something more than lunch money.

The reason crypto is blowing up isn’t because it’s a ponzo scheme. It’s because laws around accredited investing are truly the most egregiously disgusting instantiation of class warfare ever to exist, and finally small guys have a chance to do what the wealthy have been doing since forever: take their extra money and invest it. All the “pure” crypto companies are total bullshit, minus many BTC and ETH, because they have no product. That I agree with. But in time you’ll see a huge growth in companies that are simply normal tech companies with novel tech/uses, but who build in community ownership, rewards and incentives that actually share profit with their user base.

Again: why do people not get paid for contributions to Pinterest, Yelp, Reddit? These are companies paying millions of dollars to employees, and 100% of their content is given to them by users. In a better world they are actually run by the community, owned by the community, and developed in the open.

Any company could do this with fiat currency today. "Crypto" has nothing to do with it.

> Take any traditional tech company that has nothing to do with crypto and just change one thing: instead of paying early adopters who help the platform grow $150 bucks, which is nothing, pay them in what is essentially a micro-dose of stock.

Likewise, there is nothing stopping a company doing this today without "crypto".

> finally small guys have a chance to do what the wealthy have been doing since forever: take their extra money and invest it

You're ignoring the existence of the stock market, index funds, exchange-traded funds, fractional share purchasing, Robinhood no-fee trading, etc.

And your final response is an absolutely perfect example of cherry picking. I said VC, you reply with index funds. Laughable.

This is nonsense. Sure, on a technical level, you can ensure that Google2 will only have 10,000 crypto-shares, and will never issue any more. Regular Google can issue new stock and there's not much that can be done.

But the volume at which public companies or even private companies trade stock is so huge that there's no use case you can imagine that would tank the stock. You're talking about micro-payments -- Google2 is not going to pay people $30 an hour (crypto or USD) to upvote comments or submit useful content. I know this because Google1 barely pays YouTubers (outside of the top x% who make real money, and even they have ad dollars siphoned off by Google). Google1 could issue a million new shares of the stock to pay its moderators, and all they'd do is tank the stock price. But all their most valuable employees are paid heavily in stock. They wouldn't be happy and would quit or riot. It's a soft-regulation on that kind of silly behavior.

Despite 20+ years of "pay users to use the site" being an obvious conclusion, almost no site has done this in a meaningful way. There are hardly any even paying people in funny money / company scrip. All I can think of are Eve Online and Steam. You can't convert money OUT (regulations) but you can use their chuck-e-cheese tokens to buy stuff within their business. On Steam, the money you get per value the user puts in is a pittance. Valve takes a 30ish % cut on almost everything you do, even "secondhand" trading card transactions.

You can speculate that financial regulations are preventing it, but I think it's more likely that the owners of Google2 would much prefer to keep as much capital for themselves and not let its users/"staffers" get a slice. Similarly, Google1 pays its low-level moderator staff very little (compared to an engineer or upper level manager). Most corporations turn a profit. That's a very clear indicator of 'money on the table' - money that the owners chose not to return to the people performing labor for the company, whether volunteer or employee.

You imply a kind of 51% governance of an open source or community driven project. History shows that community projects fork all the time over personal differences, and majority does not always rule. Google2 coin won't matter if people get mad at Google2's governance and fork it for Google2.5 coin. If you can't fork the coin, then it sounds like regular stock or company scrip.

https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/18843/how-does-a-p...

> Google2 is not going to pay people $30 an hour (crypto or USD) to upvote comments or submit useful content. I know this because Google1 barely pays YouTubers (outside of the top x% who make real money, and even they have ad dollars siphoned off by Google)

Google pays tons of content people, they also have 130 billion in cash.

Google2 may make the mistake of being greedy, but GoogleN may not because they have a team that realizes less greed = users paid more = more incentive. Forking is a feature not a bug.

Success being correlated with fairness in equity distribution, users having stake and say in the platforms they use, creators having contracts with how they earn their living that can’t be changed on a whim, and if they ever do change, it’s by a democratic process, and creators then being able to vote with their feet to fork.

Seems like a good thing.

> even they have ad dollars siphoned off by Google

> That's a very clear indicator of 'money on the table' - money that the owners chose not to return to the people performing labor for the company, whether volunteer or employee.

These are arguments for crypto.

> https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/18843/how-does-a-p...

GoogleN can design the coin/share pool however they want, so I don’t see what the argument is.

Looking at the current front page, seems like a Wikipedia2 would work too https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...

To be clear, I think these companies need to be non-profit but still pay their team well (a fixed rate to some sort of inflation basket that tracks competitive engineer salaries, for example).

What is unclear to me, is how these remittances work in practice. I get that in the US you can exchange USD to Bitcoin with a credit card and then send that to a person in, say, Venezuela (or share the wallet password). But how is it converted back to Venezuelan Bolivar? I can't imagine you buying a pizza with bitcoin in Caracas.

Side question, why do you write your years with a leading zero? I've never seen that before and it has quite a cognitive strain for me.

One thing I do know is that a lot of overseas Venezuelans whose remittances are via Bitcoin don't know Bitcoin is involved. They know a storefront where people transmit money to Venezuela, and the guy there tells them where to instruct their family members in Venezuela to pick up the money. How the agent in Venezuela gets paid is no concern of the customers; they only care that the money they give the guy arrives safe and sound.

https://news.bitcoin.com/venezuelans-can-now-use-bitcoin-to-...

Not OP, but I had the same question and did a few seconds of cursory searching to no avail. But rather than cognitive strain, I found it opened up a much larger vista on the perception of time and our seeming place in it. While I am unlikely to adopt it, perhaps the experience would be even broader with a few more zeros tacked on! ;-)

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar

That's likely a Long Now reference: https://blog.longnow.org/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-dig...

I'm from Canada, and moved to Australia. I was moving money from Canada to Australia, it was easier, faster, and cheaper for me to move that money via crypto (I used Eth rather than Bitcoin at the time) than going through the banking system.

The irony with the GP’s post is that I can’t see using Bitcoin, with its current incredibly-high power usage and associated environmental destruction, as long-term thinking in any way, shape or form.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation

https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...

Now, at some point in the future, Bitcoin might become an environmental problem; the cheapest ways to get energy have been environmentally destructive in the past, and they may be so again. Maybe in 50 years we'll have to campaign against Bitcoin miners who want to convert the mass of Jupiter into energy with their fusion reactors or black-hole clusters. But right now the only places that Bitcoin is causing environmental damage are places where some government has unwisely subsidized fossil-fuel consumption, and Bitcoin itself is what puts an end to those subsidies.

For the forseeable future energy production cannot be carbon-free. All uses of energy, including Bitcoin mining, will continue to impose an environmental cost. For those of us who believe Bitcoin achieves nothing useful that can't be done better some other way, that cost translates into a pure negative.

It doesn't make the argument you have just elucidated, which is an interesting one. I'll think about it.

> Because you judge our lives useless, you engage in motivated reasoning to find excuses to sweep us away,

"Bitcoin not useful" != "your life is useless". I think you have invested rather too much of your identity into Bitcoin.

Regarding "Roca", please check my HN bio. My real name is "Robert O'Callahan" and 'roca' is a handle I've used online since 1990. I have never heard of your "Roca" before.

2) Electricity is one of the few things that are about as fungible as money. All your blithering about how "crypto uses only the most environmentally friendly energy!" is bullpucky, since that only means that some actually useful stuff must now run on other, less environmentally friendly energy.

3) You misspelled "I sincerely apologise for my unfounded and calumnious accusation". Please stop being such an egregious arsehole.

② electricity is fungible, but not portable or storable, and is almost all generated within 200km of its point of use (and well under 10 milliseconds). Also, the supply of electrical power is not fixed; it is rapidly expanding in response to demand. So one use of electricity does not imply less electrical power available even for other things in the same location. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27449443 has a much deeper dive on the issues.

③ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27377190 was posted the day before your unworthy comment.

Yet imagine my perception when I find that someone has popped up here to argue against such safeguards, and he's using the name of the guy whose face is on the $100 bill, whose fame primarily derives from commanding genocidal Argentine government abuses against the peoples in Argentina who didn't use the Argentine currency, and who is also the most famous person in the world by that name. The Roca $100 bills are gradually being replaced—all the ones I have here have Eva Perón instead of Roca on them—but it's only been, I think, a couple of days since the last portrait of that white-supremacist rapist visage has been inflicted upon me, when I got my change at the supermarket on Monday.

So, I hope you can forgive my error of assuming that the astounding degree of relevance of your chosen name to the topic at hand, which I take to be the social value of alternatives to the state-imposed currency system in Argentina, was intentional partisan trolling on your part, rather than a sort of absurd coincidence of cosmic proportions. I should have at least checked your HN bio, as you say, before assuming ill intent.

I continue to maintain that your dismissal of the utility of Bitcoin bespeaks either an astonishing degree of willingness to prioritize your own interests, and the interests of people like yourself, over the interests of people like me; or an astonishing degree of confidence in your own judgment of what causal relations obtain in Argentina over the judgment of those of us who live here.

After this exchange, though, I don't blame you if you don't think much of my judgment!

I ctrl-F "subsid" in your link and don't see any source for your claim. Bitcoin puts a dollar value on (subsidizes) -ALL- energy. If there's a dirty coal plant you can run in your backyard without the government shutting you down, Bitcoin wants to know about it.

Your claim is (1) bitcoin takes energy (2) renewable is cheaper than nonrenewable (3) bitcoin is causing tons of new renewable capacity.

If that were true, why isn't every power plant in the US renewable? How on earth did Bitcoin manage to get this capacity that nobody else has? Money talks, right? Why aren't the mayors of San Francisco, New York, Chicago etc. trumpeting their new 100% renewable grids?

Then you might say that Bitcoin is tech-enabled and decentralized, you can run a mining rig near any energy+internet source. But that's equally true of a cloud compute farm. The fact that bitcoin is pointless hashes and not cloud compute is a historical quirk. Any Bitcoin node/farm could be replaced with an identical-power-usage server farm and do more good for society.

I'd like a source on your Bitcoin only uses renewable claim. I think if I run a miner on my home PC, which I believe has some natural gas in the energy mix, that argument fails.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/private-equity-f...

> But right now the only places that Bitcoin is causing environmental damage are places where some government has unwisely subsidized fossil-fuel consumption, and Bitcoin itself is what puts an end to those subsidies.

I wrote this whole comment without getting to the end of your inane post. We agree that implicit subsidies are bad (burning fossil fuels creates externalities, failing to tax them is a subsidy). But your wordsmithing here is bad faith. Your argument is basically "governments thought people wouldn't be complete jerks, and Bitcoin sure proved them wrong!" Yeah it's human nature and perhaps inevitable, but 50+ years for some of these hydro dams without a problem until Bitcoin came in and ruined everything.

Bitcoin is an ongoing real time climate catastrophe. Get back to me when China and the US ban all forms of carbon-emitting energy production. Until then, those "subsidies" continue, and it matters quite a lot what use for the subsidized energy we find. I suggest cloud computing as a baseline. "environmental destruction right now" is exactly the current state of things.

I don't think bitcoin is "causing tons of new renewable capacity", if by that you mean inducing people to bring up many new power plants; its overall power usage is estimated at only about 12 GW. By comparison, PRC installed 71.7 GW of new wind power in 02020; at China's historical wind capacity factor of 22% that'll be 15.8 GW, more than the entire bitcoin network. Including the parts that are running off hydropower and the parts that are outside China.

> We agree that implicit subsidies are bad (burning fossil fuels creates externalities, failing to tax them is a subsidy)

I wasn't talking about implicit subsidies, which aren't enough to make fossil-fuel power price-competitive with renewables. I was talking about explicit subsidies. Like when I was in Venezuela you could fill up the 20-gallon gas tank on an old car for 19¢, because the gasoline was subsidized. That's the kind of subsidy that can make fossil fuels cheaper than renewables: you can run your bitcoin farm off a gas generator. It's not just "failing to tax them".

> 50+ years for some of these hydro dams without a problem until Bitcoin came in and ruined everything.

Yeah, that's not what I'm talking about.

> those "subsidies" continue, and it matters quite a lot what use for the subsidized energy we find.

Not really. I mean, a little? That 01967 Buick swilling that 1¢ per gallon gasoline is producing almost exactly the same amount of CO₂ as if the gasoline were getting burned by a nice new Honda motorcycle (or generator), and it's also producing a fair amount of unburned hydrocarbons and even methane. That matters a lot to the kids with asthma who live next door, and the global warming potential of the total horrific exhaust cocktail is a bit higher than if it were cleanly burned to CO₂ and H₂O. But, from a climate-change point of view, the high-order bit of the problem is that the government was subsidizing the burning of fossil fuels, which results in a lot more fossil fuels getting burned.

So the real problem is not what the energy is getting used for, but that the subsidies make it attractive to get that energy from fossil fuels instead of solar, because you pay for solar but the government pays for gasoline. If bitcoin mining could bring those subsidies to an end by making them suddenly much more costly, which I doubt, then so much the better.

But really, zooming out a bit, Venezuela is not the main culprit in climate change. Whatever happens there isn't going to have a big effect on climate change, one way or the other, until things chang a lot. Europe and the US are the main culprits.

> Bitcoin is an ongoing real time climate catastrophe.

12 GW is about 0.07% of total world marketed energy consumption. There's an ongoing real-time climate catastrophe, but at the moment Bitcoin is almost as much of a distraction as plastic straws. Not that it couldn't get bigger.

One of the most interesting aspects of crypto to me is it's like printing money - having held some bitcoin and having it in an account is rather like the government printing it and giving it to you as a grant. It doesn't directly create goods or services but it does have an effect for better or worse.

Holy crapballs, yeah it was! I remember when I learned HTML in 1996 and put up one of those blinkety animated GIF homepages on the hosting space given (for free!) by my local dial-up ISP. They had a local chatroom and I spent hours and hours chatting with locals from the same city--even met some of them! I read the hacker's manifesto and about phreaking and all of that stuff, found Usenet, played Quake over 33.6kbps dialup with a 300ms ping and still wiped the floor with people. I remember when mp3's came out. It took me 5 mins to download my first one. C&C music factory--everybody dance now!

But that's just nostalgia part. The reality is that nowadays the internet is ad-laden crapware/spyware that is scheming every second of every day to get you to do something--sign up for something, buy something, like something, rate something. Your eyeballs, your likes, your hates, your friends, your vices and quirks, are worth billions to multi-national corps who hope to never have to give you customer service, who keep you at AI-defended arms-length, but will happily sell your attention (won through their latest crack-like invention) to the highest bidder.

It feels like the internet is infested with the worst of human carnival barkers and con-artists these days.

If someone was doing anything commercial over e-mail or usenet you could contact their "sysop" or their upstreams and have them removed.

(It was 15 USD so costed almost as much to cash in Europe as it was worth)

The more time passes, the shriller the cries of skeptics become, leading me to believe that skeptics are emotionally invested to the extreme in the failure of crypto. I rarely see any carefully considered, informed opinions just tulips and drugs and money laundering lol. You know what is used for drugs? Cash. You know how money is laundered? Banks. You know what is worthless? Venezuelan currency. Sure, crypto, just like any fungible asset, is used in these ways... but none nearly as much a fiat is.

I’m becoming convinced that naysayers are more and more afraid of having been wrong and missing the boat as time goes on.

Every day Bitcoin fails to go to 0, it gains legitimacy as a store of value and means of payment.

I guess that is pretty nerve wracking if you made a hasty decision early on to pretend it wasn’t happening, and now it seems like you’re being left in the dust, still preaching from your soap box.

It’s been more than a decade. It’s here to stay. It will get better, but it’s not going anywhere.

I have no regrets investing in broad market index funds, because I know what they represent, how they work, and how even if Amazon drops to 1/10th of its value I still own a small slice of the company. If bitcoin drops I own a bitcoin, which no adherent can explain the purpose of.

There's no "there" there. It doesn't do what it's supposed to do, most of the adherents don't know what they're buying, the "store of value" argument just makes it a worse version of fine art, gold, or real estate. The economic case for bitcoin is anti-fiat. Fine, but that's a minority opinion. Hundreds of millions of Americans buzz along in a fiat system and don't seem much worse for the wear. The massive COVID bailout kept millions out of poverty, kept food on the table, kept businesses open, etc.

"Failed states print money and crash the economy so they need bitcoin". Why Bitcoin and not another crypto? I can never answer that. Hardly anything in tech is forever. BASIC was once cool, now it's Python. Would I bet $30,000 that Python is the language of choice 50 years from now? No. Bitcoin is a cool proof of concept that is eclipsed tech wise by dozens of other coins. I'm still skeptical of other coins, and hardcore skeptical of PoW when the W is useless (hashing). Bitcoin is the top of the skepticism pyramid. There's no point.

"Bitcoin value has changed 200,000x in a decade and just halved in a few weeks."

"You're envious because you didn't get rich quick."

"I thought this wasn't a get rich quick scheme?"

"It isn't, how could you suggest such a thing? It's a currency used to buy groceries in Venezuela."

"Then why do you care about it - do you put your savings into the Mongolian Tugrik because it's a currency used to buy groceries? Do you go round singing its praises on the internet?"

"No, because they won't get me rich quick. It's still a currency, deal with it."

"Doesn't that rapid change in value make it a poor thing to use as currency?"

"It's unquestionably better than a hyperinflationary fiat currency in a collapsing state."

"Almost anything would be."

"You're just dissing it out of envy because you didn't get rich quick. Look at that - over $30,000/coin, nothing that valuable could be nonsense or scammy!"

"Tulips?"

"That's all you ever say, Tulips, Madoff, Ponzi, Pyramid."

"They were all things that had high valuations and were nonsense. At least tulips have some inherent value, unlike Bitcoin, you can't grow or eat Bitcoin."

"Ah! Ah! You can't eat gold!"

"Indeed you can't. If you like that kind of thing, do you hold any gold?"

"No, gold won't get me rich quick."

> "It’s been more than a decade. It’s here to stay."

I guess this is why you're religious - it's been here for a long time, many people believe in it, that's enough to convince you, yes?

(Hey, couldn't it be something like one potential upvote per comment I read, in stead? And then I could give several of those from comments I don't deem worthy of upvoting to those I do.)

BTC as a means of payment is a joke. Most Bitcoin fans I engage with have actually given up on that. In fact, the scaling limitations of Bitcoin transactions are now touted as a good thing because that bounds the eventual energy usage of the network.

The Bitcoin cult is strong enough that I have no doubt Bitcoin is here to stay. It's sad, but it doesn't bother me. On the other hand it's obvious why Bitcoin HODLers have a deep financial interest in crypto being "here to stay".

You can't just pile up gold and then expect to get something for it if everyone else is dead. You need a group of people (aka economy) willing to work for the gold.

All people mean by this is the demand and supply for Gold is very predictable, relatively speaking.

https://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/ I clicked "load more" until I saw 1400 cryptocurrencies, if Bitcoin is 12 years old, that's averaging a new cryptocurrency every 3 days since Bitcoin's creation. There's probably a lot more than that.

Bitcoin is a horrible store of value. It might not go to zero, but it’s fluctuates wildly.

I think for people who predicted from a decade ago that this was all nonsense, the case is there that it is.

Realistically, what are we looking at? What runs on smart contracts? What is being bought and sold with Bitcoin.

This answer is not nothing, but…I mean really? This is the revolution?

As far as legal uses, the only one that has any amount of traffic is speculation. That’s it. Are there other people using it occasionally for other things? Sure! But then we’re looking at, checks ledger NFTs?

All of this while burning through tremendous amounts of electricity. We’re talking over half a percent of the total energy consumption of human civilization.

What have we gotten in return? This isn’t like people pushing back against airplanes or paper or rice. There’s no denying that a lot of money is thrown around, but you can only talk about people being “left in the dust” if you can point to something worth, again, >0.5% of electricity consumption of the PLANET.

Oh, I am also worried about not completing that robotics project I started, because I don't have enough time.

Thanks for your comment.

That's exactly what it does.

Most electrical power plants are still coal-, oil-, or gas-fired.

- The Internet emerged from a community in which it afforded real and tangible benefits, without any one single locus of control. (Research universities, along with a number of government departments and a few major tech and defence contractors, principally.) Perhaps an alternate payment mechanism might emerge similarly.

- The Internet tools which did emerge ... were well-suited to a small-world network in which local reputations could be assessed and acted on (loss of campus-based access with administrators overseeing populations of a few dozens to hundreds, rarely more than 1,000, through the early 1990s). Effectiveness at larger scales and in more hostile environments has proved ... problematic.

- A clear statement of the problem(s) posed by present currency and payment systems is still lacking. Statements as do exist tend to be ... weakly grounded in emperical truth, strongly ideological (not necessarily a fault, but often one), and strongly resistant to actual demonstrated superiority after decades of effort.

In the case of cryptocurrencies, people are doing existing things that can already be done quickly and efficiently vastly less efficiently, in a system that is purposely designed to be less efficient, where efficiency is in fact actively counteracted. Databases and online money transactions were possible before, at a fraction of the total cost inherent to the system and at vastly higher performance.

When theorizing about societal/political benefits, take into account the societal/political problems cryptocurrencies created by inventing a machine that allows converting resources directly into money of miners' digital wallets without regulation.

Your sending any amount of money, actual practicality and realizability aside, comes at the cost of a lottery, where miners perform literally 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 computations per second whose outcome is completely thrown away, unless they are lucky enough to be one of the 6 computations per hour that win. This cannot be made more efficient: If computing one hash costs less energy, the difficulty will be adjusted to require more calculations to keep the target of 6 hashes per hour.

By the decentralized property of cryptocurrencies, it is by design not possible to regulate where the energy for this lottery is coming from.

That being said, I still see proof of stake and proof of coverage as interesting way to maintain said ledger integrity in the like… 3 actually existing use case where a blockchain is superior to a SQLite instance with good security.

Many other Proof of Stake blockchains like Cosmos have been live and working fine for years.

I have many other doubts against the usefulness and sensibility of blockchains in general, e.g. I have doubts how smart contracts actually succeed to reach their goals in a reality where humans make mistakes and courts are used to settle disputes and ambiguities. But these concerns then only affect the viability of technologies that I and others are not forced to participate in.

Proof-of-work on the other hand, as long as it continues to exist, affects everyone in that in incentivizes burning resources directly for money without regulation, no matter how dirty or wasteful.

That said, I think everyone should be able to buy electricity and spend it on what they want, even dumbfuck videogames that waste their life away. If we play the "your electricity is bad, my electricity is good" game then it leads to the majority restricting the minority.

Instead, we should price electricity based on externalities and let purchasers use it as they want. If electricity is 100% clean and the buyer chooses to mine bitcoin, that's their value decision, just as you playing videogames is your (very stupid) decision, but I support your right to waste electricity on it.

https://support.circle.com/hc/en-us/articles/213560643--Iden...

You have to account for transaction fees into cryptocurrency, the blockchain transaction fee itself, and the conversion into the target local currency.

You left 2/3rds of that process out, conveniently.

"Myanmar’s government shuts down internet indefinitely" - https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/1/22362767/myanmar-military-...

"Bangladeshi government shuts down callphone/internet access in Rohingya camps" - https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/09/13/bangladesh-internet-blac...

"Democratic Republic of the Congo shuts down internet and SMS" - https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?N...

"Indian government shuts down internet in Kashmir" - https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/08/28/india-restore-kashmirs-i...

"Iranian authorities shut down internet" - https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/11/27/iran-deliberate-coverup-...

"Independent group observes 'near-total' shutdown of Iraqi internet access" - https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/11/08/iraq-teargas-cartridges-...

"Sudan's ongoing internet shutdown" - https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/06/12/sudan-end-network-shutdo...

"China bans ICOs, shuts down domestic exchanges, and uses great firewall to block foreign exchanges and crypto websites" - https://www.yahoo.com/news/china-enlists-apos-great-firewall...

https://www.sandbox.game/en/ https://decentraland.org/

These are 3D virtual world environments and people are using crypto to build an online economy. They are trading property, buying virtual artwork and creating galleries, setting up clubs and meeting spaces, etc.

You can also explore decentralized finance, act as a peer-to-peer lender, provide liquidity in a marketplace, fund an idea you're interested in, whether that's a game (https://illuvium.io) or a commission for a comic book series (https://www.one37pm.com/nft/art/punks-comic-pixel-vault-cryp...) or start a DAO and raise money for charity or open source software (https://gitcoin.co/).

What you're describing here is Roblox (2006), which was launched 2 years before Bitcoin was conceived, and has attained a market cap of >$50 billion without any cryptocurrency nonsense. Or Second Life (2003). Or RuneScape (2001).

Cryptocurrency doesn't enable online trading with virtual currency -- if anything, it's dramatically _more_ difficult to use than either real plastic, or virtual currency sitting in a SQL table.

What it enables is theoretical trust in a shared ledger (handwaving that a Sybil attack isn't attempted by any of the massive mining pools); but this trust is assuming you're a computer scientist capable of auditing the clients and contracts. Yet, even professional programmers have lost hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crypto with programming mistakes and security flaws in their smart contracts and clients! If even professional crypto software developers can't take advantage of cryptocurrency's supposed benefits, how are the players of an online game supposed to?

The answer is of course that they have to relegate trust, in the same way that online shoppers relegate trust to Visa/Mastercard. The important difference being that only Visa/Mastercard guarantee your funds are returned if you're defrauded.

Sybil attacks would be detected in an open network first of all. If you can pull it off, I invite you to try: there's hundreds of billions of dollars on the table protected by nothing but cryptography and game theory. Knock yourself out. I'm sure all the people in this space are idiots and haven't seen the holes you claim are there.

I'm old enough to remember when using a credit card was a hassle or seen as predatory on consumers and many people either refused to use credit or accept credit in their businesses. For several decades using a credit card wasn't any more convenient than using cash or check even. Over time, the scanners got better and faster, Visa and MasterCard integrated with ATM debit cards, and then mobile phones and swiping plugins enabled it all to get better. Now it's ubiquitous. But that ubiquity will make it all the more easier for merchants to adopt crypto.

It turns out there is already crypto insurance protocols like Nexus Mutual and Cover that will cover you if a loss occurs. Insurance is really just a business problem that is easily fixable.

On the plus side crypto is far more secure than Visa or MasterCard, because it works on public/private key cryptography and you simply sign a transaction rather than enter your name and address and all the same information you'd need to commit a fraudulent credit card transaction.

The point is that no-one needs to adopt crypto for payments because the existing payment platforms work fine, better than crypto. Making transactions immutable, requiring users to maintain perfect IT security, currencies swinging in value by 20% every time Musk tweets about them, etc, are regressions.

Also for your other points - the games in this space are universally unfun to play with hardly anyone actually playing them; I can pay normal money to commission artwork; and I can use a zillion platforms that already exist to raise money.

Second Life was awesome! This Metaverse trend is pushing that concept much, much further and it's giving ownership and utility to the makers.

>you can buy a digital artwork at a Christie's auction and display it in Decentraland and have it be verifiably authentic

I can't imagine anyone would give a shit about someone's virtual art being "authentic" for whatever meaning of authentic NFTs pretend to claim. This is basically receipt porn at this point. Truly we're talking about bragging about wealth, one of the shittiest traits a person can have.

From a competitive standpoint, why would I want Activision's digital locks (you can only import NFT'd content) instead of something like Second Life which is more open?

If Activision really wanted purchases to carry over, they could've made it happen. No NFT needed. An open standard does not imply NFT, and vice versa. The 360 era was probably the peak of the 'gaming interoperability' trend, and it went almost nowhere. Your Xbox gamer picture would show up in some games. Everyone knew it was authentic because MS uses cryptography and doesn't let you sideload third party images. No NFT needed.

Same reason my company doesn't like me displaying awards from my last company. The obstacle is entirely social rather than technical.

This all happens in Second Life and doesn't need to burn the planet to do it.

Anyway, none of this matters because Bitcoin exists and is the dominant shitcoin (due to first mover advantage). All these other shitcoins can claim whatever efficiency, but it doesn't matter because that's a very isolated view of the problem. The shitcoin economy as a whole will still be fueled by mining unless somehow Bitcoin gets dethroned and the whole mining thing just goes away. I can't imagine that happening without the whole economy crashing completely into the ground – but that would bring all these efficient coins down with it.

And already more transactions and more daily volume is settled on Ethereum than Bitcoin, see https://money-movers.info/ and https://cryptofees.info/ (pink lines are Ethereum DeFi applications)

In the context of technological state (how brittle and obtuse the tools are), the comparison between the two is right on the money IMHO.

I once configured SOCKS on Windows 3.1 so I could connect to the internet over a 9600-baud modem. In those days, unless you were in Academia, you didn't know anyone with an email address. Early Usenet and IRC had very little to offer someone who wasn't a nerd. FTP? MUD gaming? Come on.

You and I found the early internet interesting precisely because we were nerds to begin with. Don't mistake that sentiment for that of the general public. They mostly found it frustrating and boring.

Fidonet was always, on a technical level, a worse experience than the internet.

BBSs have their charm, but were absolutely obviously worse at what they did that the internet.

Cryptocurrencies are just awful at solving real problems, compared to existing solutions.

Why are you talking about the general public? Are you equating "well the internet was only cool to nerds, solving their needs" with "Bitcoin is only good for its MLM speculation properties, and to buy drugs and murders"?

"Unless you were in academia"... So you admit that it WAS useful? And how it WAS much better than what it replaced? Because that's the opposite of Bitcoin.

You can hate crypto and still agree with me on the above point. It's a pretty innocuous observation.

I'm not going to engage the rest of your argument which has no bearing on the point being made.

Is your argument "it's hard to use, and therefore it's useful"?

If not, then I really don't understand what your point is.

You’re giving a completely wrong impression of how the early web was and the early internet. I wasn’t around for that so I won’t personally give my input but for the time, each iteration every few years was great.

If domain knowledge wasn’t needed by the 90s. When was serious domain knowledge needed? When did that stop?

Some people found the internet hard to use and found it required more domain knowledge than they had every single year since the internet snd web have been around. Including in the 2020s.

Comparing cryptocurrencies to the Internet is about comparing its usefulness, not it's understandability. I won't argue that people in general understood the Internet.

Take my example of Fidonet. If you were not a computer expert then you had never heard of Fidonet. BBSs? Maybe you'd heard of it in some news clip about the dangers of computers.

Hell, the only time non-experts even saw anything close to a BBS was probably the movie Wargames.

> You’re giving a completely wrong impression of how the early web was and the early internet.

In what way?

> I wasn’t around for that so I won’t personally give my input

You don't know, but you know I'm wrong about it?

For your last point. Were you around for the development of Arpanet? I don’t think there are many people who were adults in the 69s in the few places arpanet was developed at.

—

So not being around for something doesn’t exclude you from being able to discuss internet related things.

-

For understanding internet. I don’t think 99.9% of the population understands the difference between the internet and protocols like the web. Not sure that’s relevant any way tho.

In contrast not even nerds are actually using Bitcoin or Ethereum for anything that interacts with the real world. All proposed applications are self-referential shell games like NFTs, staking schemes, etc.

If this is a superior platform for finance, where’s the real economic activity? Handwaving about “probably they use it in Venezuela” doesn’t cut it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_economy

Now for some of the more useful/interesting stuff I've seen:

Gitcoin has been pioneering Quadratic Funding for open source projects for some time now: https://github.com/gitcoinco/quadratic-funding

They recent launched a governance token and DAO (many other projects have been experimenting with various types of on-chain governance models).

Both of these pursuits are widely applicable for creating sustainable models for funding and managing distributed common good projects.

Brave has over 25M active users and has built a model on their token to pay website users and creators for ads, as well as allow in-browser tipping, etc.

Many DeFi projects are experimenting with various novel forms of tokenomics (hold X tokens to access Y features; yield earned w/ Z tokens accrue to the developers) which are interesting alternatives for creating sustainable development/operational models for software.

There are projects that are doing interesting work bridging digital and physical assets (particularly in harmonizing the legal mechanisms for property) like Mattereum, but I'd argue even the simplest types of digital-only tokenization become interesting when it can be made composable with other dapps (eg, fractional ownership of projects that can later be made liquid on the open market or that can be collateralized). This ties back to the domain of not just coordinating, but incentivizing distributed collaboration/human resources.

If your argument is that crypto would decentralize it, and guarantee a cap on coin totals, I don't buy it. That's not the reason a site owner wouldn't join a coin plan. "I would love to get paid, but I hate inflation too much to consider your proposal". Fantasy land.

Note that in Gitcoin's case, GTC serves as a governance token which gives voting rights for their DAO. While it may have a market value (it certainly has some value for those who want to participate), but there is a different purpose to this type of token (the same for utility tokens).

Fraud reduction by looking at the open market ("nobody's selling these $1 tokens for anything above a nickel!") isn't plausible either - you can do the same thing today by looking at YouTuber payout rates. Those aren't public but it would take the collusion of 10,000+ top tier YouTubers, many of whom don't like YouTube very much, to lie. If YouTube were ever threatened by a more open model (ex. on Patreon, you can see actual income for some creators), they might switch to stay competitive.

> utilize your newly acquired cyber-chucks to generate yield by providing liquidity, collateralizing it, etc).

I can do this with USD so we're really talking about that X day period where my tokens haven't become USD yet. Maybe there is or will be a crypto coin or five that do what Bitcoin was supposed to do - low fees, high volume, easier and cheaper than ACH or Paypal. But if those fees are low enough, I don't necessarily need to keep by cyber chucks as cyber chucks. I could convert to USD and then back into cyber chucks, if cyber chucks is the token of choice. But I think it's far more likely that out of the hundreds-thousands of current coins, the one you pick is going to be a loser in terms of long term utility. Safer to convert to USD and then into whatever today's hot coin is.

Even today, some stock options have surprisingly little price discovery (low volume, big difference between bid and ask price). And those are real, regulated financial instruments with a direct objective relationship to present and future value. I think they can be traded across the whole market too (buy at broker A, sell to someone at broker B). I don't get how, outside of speculation, Company X's coin is going to be worth more than that. Nor will it have better price discovery - there are multiple billion dollar companies who trade stocks and options.

In current "company scrip" modes (ex. casino chips) people generally don't hold onto the not-cash. They exchange it for USD within days. If MGM decides to screw over their customers and cut the conversion rate by 10x, (1) that might be illegal, (2) the % of total customers in history that will be affected are small.

We're also generally proposing micro- or mini-payments - if it's high dollar like a salary, you'll just get USD from working at a company. How many people would take a job at 1-to-1 equivalence in a crypto token instead of a USD salary? Today, I can buy stock in my company using the USD they give me. It's much safer to me because I can choose how much to put in. If I got paid in CompanyCoin that would be a return to the company scrip days. I'd be tied up in risk for minimal gain. If the coin is stable it doesn't matter if I can only invest my USDs every payday.

I admit I don't know much about ERC20 specifically. I still don't see why you can't make a useless token on ERC20. Analogous to making an app that works with all bank accounts that nobody wants to use.

> Note that in Gitcoin's case, GTC serves as a governance token which gives voting rights for their DAO.

People talk about using crypto for democratic community governance. I said this in another comment chain:

> You imply a kind of 51% governance of an open source or community driven project. History shows that community projects fork all the time over personal differences, and majority does not always rule. Google2 coin won't matter if people get mad at Google2's governance and fork it for Google2.5 coin.

Open source is generally driven by a small core of contributors. I don't see crypto voting being anything but a rubber stamp on the current pool of high activity users. I don't hate the idea here but I also don't see much point.

You could issue those tokens in a centralized way, but with Ethereum, a 1000 such tokens can interact.

The question is rather, if you wanted to do a cyber chuck e cheese, why wouldn't you do it on a (performant) blockchain?

If the question is why do we need all those tokens for, and this is a good perspective on it:

https://insights.deribit.com/market-research/why-i-have-chan...

I don't see value here over JP Morgan Chase operating the market as a neutral third party. Maybe Chase won't really be neutral because they want to steer you to USD and not tokens. But there's gotta be some neutral party that can govern it, something like Coinbase.

Boring old databases and the tech of 10-30 years ago are more efficient than blockchain in all cases, afaik. No matter how efficient, the design of blockchain requires distributed workers verifying each other's transactions. On Chase's server farm, server A can trust server B. All I need is a ledger of how many tokens I have, and a way to convert to USD, the tether of the real world. I can use USD to get into Ether and those 1000 tokens any time I want.

> a 1000 such tokens can interact.

It's basically an API / standard for tokens right? Today I can make an app that uses the IMDB api, but if nobody cares, the app is useless. You can make an app that uses the latest hot tech (raytracing in GPUs) but if nobody likes what you made, it's useless. Same with ERC20, if I understand correctly. I can stand outside Chuck E Cheese and try to make a secondary market in tokens. Nothing illegal about that. Tokens are traded using the hand-to-hand protocol. Yet the number of such businesses is close to zero.

Gift cards for places like Walmart and Amazon are nearly as good as cash on eBay. Nobody buying them is worried about those companies issuing too many cards and crashing the currency.

But to that I would say that the banks haven't built it, and I don't see it happening or gaining adoption. Whatever they build will by definition not be an open network, and will likely not cross too many geographic borders.

It is sort of inconceivable that some 16 year olds would be allowed to run a lending protocol on the Chase blockchain, or even a random adult, for that matter. Plenty of people would find that positive, no doubt, but it is even hard to imagine a platform being built where companies in say India could get access to on the same terms as those in the US.

Ultimately, the permission-less nature of Ethereum is what has built the DeFi infrastructure we have today, which for all its flaws, is pretty impressive.

1) You just flatly contradicted yourself without even realizing it. The top level comment said "The reality is that the internet was immediately extremely interesting (either useful or fun) for practically everyone who got access.". When challenged, you moved the bar to "Well, it eventually became useful to everyone!".

2) You're condescending "I can see how people in their twenties would fall for this...", "Handwaving", "Shell games".

3) You've got some internal benchmark about what qualifies as useful that appears to mean "if it's not useful to me, then it doesn't count" (see comment about Venezuela).

4) You seem to think of yourself as some kind of gatekeeper or authority on nerddom.

I'm not going to change your mind about anything. I've been around the internet long enough to spot people pretending to want genuine engagement when they really despise your ideas and just want to publicly slam dunk on you.

Not interested.

Initially only nerds had access and they couldn’t get enough. When access expanded to the general public, they couldn’t get enough either.

“You’ve Got Mail” is a 1998 movie starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. The internet was completely mainstream just 16 years after the military decided to standardize on IPv4.

If there will be a 2024 Hollywood blockbuster called “You’ve Got Bitcoin”, it’s going to be a dark parody of speculation and greed, not a heartwarming tale of how much cryptocurrency helped average people connect with each other.

My whole family had access. And the families of all my friends. They hated it. It was boring and complex. If you mean "everyone who sought access" then it's a self-fulfilling prophecy isn't it? You're either misremembering or engaging in disingenuous word play.

>The internet was completely mainstream just 16 years after the military decided to standardize on IPv4.

So 16 years is the benchmark? Seems arbitrary (because it is). Bitcoin is 12 years old. When the Internet was about 12, what did Newsweek say?

>If there will be a 2024 Hollywood blockbuster called “You’ve Got Bitcoin”, it’s going to be a dark parody of speculation and greed, not a heartwarming tale of how much cryptocurrency helped average people connect with each other.

The discussion wasn't whether Crypto is a more important technology than the internet. It was about how clunky and shitty it was at the beginning. Nothing more. Stop trying to "slam dunk" on people.

AOL was a bonanza. I didn’t use it but that started getting big enough in the mid 90s. I got on the internet as a kid barely in school in 93-94. It was vast to me. To my older brother, etc.

—

Your attitude and anger appears to be doing exactly what you’re claiming others are doing. Liken slam dunking on people.

You can also tell me, as a nerd who has lived through both eras, why my experience doesn't count?

If all the speculative activity isn't real enough, how about the ransoms being paid to ransomware authors?

Also completely irrelevant for any of the cryptocurrencies and smart contract systems.

I too got on the Internet in the early 1990s with e-mail, FTP, Usenet, and MUDs. I'm not actually an early Internet user. That'd be folks like my friend's dad, who worked at BBN in the 1970s, or the folks at Symbolics, who registered the first domain name in 1985.

Same with LAN parties. I was thrilled to buy my first network card, and a tee connector.

Even the fact that the first half of the day was mostly wasted with trying to get IPX and NetBEUI to work and TCP and UDP, and promising each other that we would not change anything until the next LAN party, and of course next time nothing worked either at first try. But it was fun nonetheless.

(The second half of the first day was obviously swapping all those music and video files)

Internet and Ethernet were useful immediately.

https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/the-birth-and-ri...

You couldn't Google that. Because there was no Google, and you were stuck in a basement.

Fun and exciting times :)

Living on the edge !

My parents still have fond memory of seing skinny teenager bringing computers on well barrel in their basement to play video game.

They were suspicious at first. But then they concluded they we were indeed playing video game.

That, literally all by itself, would be enough for me to think building the internet was worth it.

You kids have no idea how much fun it was to go downtown to a travel agent just to find out how much it would cost to fly home from college for Christmas.

Phones were out, too?

("You kids" should realize that most of the stuff done on the web today was done by mail or phone during most of the XX century, especially in a country as spread out as the US. Ring up the merchant with the order, sing out the credit card, done, was the MO from the 70s to the late 90s.)

Obviously there were variations on how people would do things and mail order existed but I’m speaking literally, that’s how we used to do it and when the internet came along it got way way better.

Darn, no mail service either. That's harsh.

Edit: first thing bought on the internet apparently was weed https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-was-first-thi...

It felt futuristic, here to stay.

Bitcoin feels like a great experiment and proof of concept. And someday a useful cryptocurrency may arise from the lessons learnt. But it won't be Bitcoin.

People donate to CoS as well as "invest" in crypto; this practice has tangible benefit to the recpients of the funds. These beneficiaries do not want the benefit to end. They wnat it to grow. The suppression of "negative" commentary about crypto online is frightening to watch because it honestly seems to work. It is some sort of community-based censorship.

But complaining about something without taking the underlying behaviors in good faith and synthesizing alternatives doesn't really offer much for the people who are looking for the good things. That's why you won't get many good faith actors interacting with this, because it's better for them (and implicitly, the negation of your premise that it's all scams) for them to negate your arg by building more and more new things with crypto.

I'd argue you just haven't explored enough around its possibilities. I just read this today. https://twitter.com/mcuban/status/1400459822080819204

I think we're just beginning to get to the good stuff.

BC has value because it a limited supply of a unique item that can be mathematically verified, even if it never solves all problems its advocates claim to want to solve in the world.

It might not have value to you personally, but it currently does to some people. Just like you might not value Micheal Jordan's rookie card, it is after all a supposedly limited supply piece of printed thin cardboard, there are plenty of people that do.

Let's pretend crypto currency tech didn't exist. Your local gov't wants to develop a digital currency that is verifiable, devoid of simple fraud and counterfeit, and is completely traceable by the general public.

All the smart people in the country would get to together and would come up with system that would end up looking a lot like block chain. The gov't would control all the nodes of course. They would contract out server maintenance (mining), charge fees on transactions (sales tax) and banks would hold your digital currency and give you interest (staking). Instead of stocks, companies would probably just issue, I dunno, something uniquely tied to them that equates to value, like a ... token?

It's not much different from what we do now, it just doesn't involve a bunch of baggage paper money has been carrying around for hundreds of years.

Personally, I would like to be able to (legally!) program against my money and do stuff with it without being beholden to big banks. I think it would be cool if I could automatically send 1% or whatever of all my transactions to a charity of my choice, or if I could do my own "micro-finance" lending to farmers in developing countries, or other things like that which currently require a bank to implement it and me to use whatever they implement. But it is far from clear whether all this cryptocurrency and DeFi stuff is either necessary or sufficient to do any of this kind of stuff.

That's quite an absurd statement to make. I can easily find people right now that find no interest in the current internet, it's literally impossible that in the past it would have been different with way less interesting things to do on it..

There's a huge bias in what you state. I have no doubt that plenty of people who got access at the time found it interesting, but the thing you ignore is that theses are the one that found it interesting that got access in the first place.

Like sure email are incredibly useful, but to send to who? It's is right now that I can send them to 2 billions users, but in 1996, that was 16 millions... kind of much less useful, the chances are most people you knew, didn't knew anyone that was on it at the time... thus literally useless. FTP are nice, but plenty didn't used computers at all, sharing files meant nothing. I know so many right now that have trouble sharing files, yet FTP still exist... no chance they would have shared any in the past.

You are now on that team, the ones that don't have any use for it right now. It's fine that you don't find it interesting, but please don't be that old grandpa that scream "get out of my lawn" please...

> The early Internet was infinite times more fun.

Curiously, I've seen tons of people having fun with cryptocurrencies, in different ways, you are just not part of it...

i remember i believed in it in 2013 before becoming disillusioned. but there’s people who first bought it in 2020 who tell me i don’t understand ot

Perhaps useful in 1% of contracts, useless otherwise.

haven’t seen anything where it’s actually needed or better. and basically all examples end up with some sort of trust needed at some point.

such as gambling on the outcome of a sports game. it would still require a dependency on some sort of Api to provide the sports results and then you’re trusting the api to give uncorrupted correct results… which defeats the purpose of “trustless”

Will it improve the established market providers for sports betting? No. But that's the point. It enables people to make a small business betting shop

Futures contracts so they can easily sell their products at a good price regardless of market fluctuations, transfers the risk to the investors.

Smart contracts are still in super early days, the first foundational building blocks are being laid. Soon many more things will be possible.

Then you haven't looked deep enough or maybe the subject matter doesn't interest you. Don't extrapolate your experience to everyone else. I find the DeFi space and the scaling issues and layer 2 projects being built pretty interesting. Web3 and the protocols being built around that are also worth a look. Sure, there are a lot of scams and vaporware, but that's also true of the early and today's internet.

What group are you talking about when you accuse them of "Scientology-like groupthink"? What comparisons can you draw? I think it's important you back up and explain what you're saying.

The main attraction is Bitcoin and recently Dogecoin. BTC is slow and costly and mostly a speculative play. Dogecoin is a joke, but also worth billions.

Also these coins are speculatively often first, and useful second. Not all but many. Thus instead of being useful for exchange, they become methods of speculation.

It is also used for fraud a lot -- both various types of pump-and-dumb, Ponzi and money laundering.

And on top of all that it is usually inefficient.

So what we need are digital currencies that are fast, stable, and that can implement smart contracts (but these tend to be buggy as hell with no roll back.)

But that isn't what cryptocurrency is all about these days. It has been overtaken with speculation.

If we could get the benefits I outlined, that would be amazing, but it seems that very few are actually interested in that.

"It's just overtaken" is not a great take. The problems are way more fundamental – the whole concept of trustless irreversible digital cash just does not work in the real world for normal transactions.

Lots of meme coins have launched -- does not delegitimize everything else.

> ...whole concept of trustless irreversible digital cash just does not work in the real world for normal transactions

Layers will be built on top to provide that. Your vision is limited.

Yes there is a lot of money in BTC, but its not more than half, and doge coin is not #2.

It's not that we don't believe it. It's that it's a dystopia.