But from that, there is no way you should conclude that cynicism is wrong in general. You should not overreact to too much cynicism by discarding criticism entirely! You should react by seeking better information.
I haven't personally looked into blockchain or related ideas enough to get excited (I'm harder to excite now that I'm older, and I have less time) but sometimes I feel like I ought to, just because the flavor of the criticism reminds me of the smug nastiness that got directed towards people who were interested in things like computers and Star Trek when I was young. These nerds think they're onto something cool, and we have to mock them until they can't believe in it anymore. I almost feel like I should start learning the technology out of solidarity with the little kid I used to be who embraced computers despite knowing how hopelessly dorky that made him.
Of course the concept of nerdiness has been socially rehabilitated since the 1980s, and now the stigma is nominally directed towards scams and environmental waste, but the people delivering the stigma have designed the blast radius to work pretty much the same. The entire topic is stigmatized, any interest or optimism is stigmatized. I think the history of computing and the internet shows that it's hopeless to try to disentangle the utopian hope for social transformation from the grifting and greed. Scam artists can smell the hope for progress and transformation like sharks can smell blood; it means a meal for them. It's a crude distortion to argue that either optimism or greed alone properly characterizes "web3" without the other. When we look back twenty years from now they'll both be part of the story, whether these ideas fizzle out or have a transformative impact or something in between.
> And a whole bunch of problems who we don't even realize exist that can one day be solved
A few keywords: threshold signatures, zk-snarks, consensusless protocols, byzantine fault tolerant protocols, vrf, vdf, starks, bls
Can you elaborate on this?
The best critiques of blockchain tech, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DeFi, etc. describe fatal flaws at the core of those technologies. For example, the lack of monetary policy and regulations, privacy and security shortcomings, and high transaction costs.
It'd be great to read a positive analysis of the core merits (the math and the incentives) and how those can be applied to solve problems.
But does it have any practical use? That's the question. NFTs are hot right now as an investment vehicle, or as a way for artists to sell unique creations (leading to investment vehicles, I suppose). I'm not sold on the utility, long term.
I saw a short video of Keanu Reeves laughing at NFTs because they had value but are easy to copy.
Which I found somewhat funny. Keanu gets paid a lot because he acts in things that have value but are easy to copy (movies).
The reason why those have a high value is because of copyright. The people that financed the film have control over the copying of the film. Because people with guns agree with the copyright scheme (US government).
NFTs cannot have actual value unless people with the ability to enforce that scarcity cares about them.
However, I want to focus on the other possibilities for NFTs - I am making an NFT project that does have the art aspect, however the tokens also provide access to unique services like hooking into a video game engine to allow users to interact with their art. Since it's trivial to detect forgeries and ownership, even if someone was to create an NFT pointing to even the exact same piece of art, they would be denied access to the service as it is a forgery.
Right now proof of ownership is usually in the form of discord bots allowing access to servers, but there's much more you can actually do with this concept than we are seeing now, like the example above.
You're confusing the hyperlink with the destination. The hyperlink has scarcity and is impossible to copy. You can make a new near identical hyperlink, but it's not the same as the original, the community says so and will ignore the imposter. The hyperlink are what people are buying and flipping. It has whatever market value other participants agree it has.
> But does it have any practical use? That's the question.
Sounds like a solution searching for a problem.
Monorail concept appeared around 1900, trying to reduce the elevated railways problem. One designer thought of reducing the use of metal. Wuppertal suspension railway uses much more metal for tracks than conventional trams. There is a special monorail in Britain, built in 1940s, that stands on A-shaped legs. The only rail is supported by some metal triangles, using the same amount of metal. Later models, first built in Disneyland, use concrete (which contains a lot more iron in the concrete itself besides the reinforcement), and rubber wheels (sacrificing the advantage of low friction). Their biggest problem is switches: they're heavy and huge. Suspended monorails use big box instead of a rail, because swaying carriages are uncomfortable, and to hold them, the track must resist the force of a long lever. Errr... what was the reason to go for all that, in the first place? Make simpler track and use less rails/metal? Not achieved at all.
Electric buses... just 2 words: they're 3-5 times more expensive, and a whole route of e-buses requires just as much electric equipment as trolleybus line. Plus, e-buses spend twice more time charging than riding. Which means you need to triple the fleet of triple-quintiple more expensive vehicles. Even if battery technology progresses, as some insist, let it improve for private, not public money.
It seems that blockchain is similar: couple of advantages, lots of big disadvantages.
The way I look at it is that this is a tool. The way it is used is up to the creativity of the engineer(s) working with it. I think that using NFTs in this manner is a lot easier for me to manage than other approaches, and it's pretty fun. Practical use? Idk it's a fun art project that I hope people enjoy, but yeah I do think it was easier for me to implement in this method than a traditional web app.
But I do think there are plenty of practical use cases that you could leverage this technology for in terms of access based on ownership of the digital assets.
Then ETH at the worst gas fees looks generous
The cryptocurrency guys who think cryptocurrencies will be immune to this are probably gonna be shocked and annoyed.
Home computers were good for games or learning to program, not sure they were actually that useful outside of those things.
Edit: Ok Atari STs were good for music and Amigas were apparently good for graphics rendering.
I'd say speculation more than investing.
The peoblem with public blockchains and related technologies is that they have been list in the middle of huge speculation markets... which brings all sorts of bullshit and scams.
That's why I like to look at hyperledger and similar technologies. If you remove the money incentives, you are left with the pure technology essence. And then you can judge it by what it is.
I mean, the 'ownership' is as real as "buy a plot of land on Mars" scams.
An inefficient distributed database filled with assertions of legally unenforceable pseudoproperty rights seems somewhat underwhelming.
But it's neither decentralized nor a proof AT ALL. NFT literally can't facilitate anything by itself, without adding some centralized DB to it and some centralized humans governing all interactions between clients.
What exactly do you want an NFT to facilitate? And are you raving mad at the people who make the NFTs, the people who buy them or both?
Ask for a reciept. An NFT is not selling "proof of ownership", its selling you a product
> transfer of ownership,
The so called "gullible buyers" would not be buyers without this process occurring. An NFT is not selling "transfer of ownership", the transfer is the process itself. It consists of a seller (aka crypto fan), a buyer (aka gullible buyers) and a product (the NFT). The product is what is being being transferred, so how can what is being transferred also facilitate the transfer of ownership?
> enforcement of ownership,
Again, ask for a reciept. If someone robs you, sue them or call the police. That "enforcement of ownership" you seek is a separate product.
> decentralization,
How much more decentralized do you want a jpeg on the internet to be, really?
> universal standards and so on
What universal standards exactly?
No, it's not, unless you are calling an entry in DB with an URL inside "a product". NFT system is selling NFT only, and NFT itself is almost nothing and useless.
> The so called "gullible buyers" would not be buyers without this process occurring. An NFT is not selling "transfer of ownership", the transfer is the process itself. It consists of a seller (aka crypto fan), a buyer (aka gullible buyers) and a product (the NFT). The product is what is being being transferred, so how can what is being transferred also facilitate the transfer of ownership?
Ok, I see you really calling the NFT itself a product. This is amusing but I must tell you that you are either misled or malicious, because other cryptobros sell people not NFT but the stuff it links to - digital file usually. And they brainwash buyers that they (buyers) are really buying the digital file.
>Again, ask for a reciept. If someone robs you, sue them or call the police. That "enforcement of ownership" you seek is a separate product.
I won't write long here, but we can see here that NFT don't facilitate any kind of "proof of ownership" and even NFT fans agree with this - you need some centralized receipts and police according them too :)
>How much more decentralized do you want a jpeg on the internet to be, really?
Decentralized proof of ownership, which is impossible today.
>What universal standards exactly?
That was about new NFT fad I'm seeing - gaming NFTs, where bros expect that different competing corporations will for some reason implement a universal standard for items between different competing games and voluntarily implement and support it. Pure BS but that is one of the NFT promises today.
Calling an entry in a DB? What kind of db exactly... maybe a public distributed ledger (aka a blockchain)? Hmmmm..... The Mona Lisa itself is almost nothing and useless. Just some paint splashed on a canvas hundreds of years ago. Totally worthless. To someone out there. Just like NFTs are totally worthless to you. Heres a small life tip: do not waste your time, energy or money in anything in life that has no value to you, because you find it totally worthless to you. But you are just one being, among seventy billion others alive today. So what is important to you, will be worthless to billions of others. Does that make them idiots? No. But it kind of makes you one if you expect everyone else alive to value only exactly what you value. Live and let live.
> Ok, I see you really calling the NFT itself a product. This is amusing but I must tell you that you are either misled or malicious, because other cryptobros sell people not NFT but the stuff it links to - digital file usually. And they brainwash buyers that they (buyers) are really buying the digital file.
You used to term "gullible buyers". The key word here being BUYERS. The definition of buyer is someone who takes ownership of a PRODUCT... in this case an NFT from someone else. I'm glad you find the concept amusing. Welcome to the world of trade and capitalism. The buyers are usually speculators. Look that term up. Ever heard of the dot-com mania? The tulip mania? If you think they were just buying flowers, you have a lot to learn about human emotions and motivation. Coca-cola is not just selling "colored sugar water".
> I won't write long here, but we can see here that NFT don't facilitate any kind of "proof of ownership" and even NFT fans agree with this - you need some centralized receipts and police according them too :)
So what? If I buy an NFT, I wont be buying it because of "proof of ownership". The very fact that I can buy it today, and sell it to someone else at a profit tommorow is all the proof of ownership I need. Got that? Thousands of NFTs are being bought and sold daily, in a marketplace. Not sure what other proof of ownership (the ability to legally sell something) you are looking for... but like I said, it seems you're still new to this world of trade and capitalism. You'll learn eventually. Hopefully.
> Decentralized proof of ownership, which is impossible today.
It is possible. You just dont understand how it works. The only impossibility here is your ability to understand what proof of ownership in the digital word entails. Can you proove that you own the hacker news account you are posting from? How? Did you just say email account and password... DING!DING!
> That was about new NFT fad I'm seeing - gaming NFTs, where bros expect that different competing corporations will for some reason implement a universal standard for items between different competing games and voluntarily implement and support it. Pure BS but that is one of the NFT promises today.
Fads will come and go. It is human nature. NFTs are no different. Websites were once a fad in the dotcom boom. Some fads help advance our tech and knowlegde.
With hicetnunc.xyz, there is already one example of a "marketplace" shutting down and being immediately replaced with alternative interfaces - which works because the underlying smart contract doesn't care what system people use to interact with it. The "blockchain is a distributed database" part does indeed work if a system is designed to use it.
Even ignoring that, many NFTs do not convey any ownership of the digital work, but rather of the NFT itself.
So far the most likely value is in a platform that actually lets you leverage that ownership, such as Meta letting you put a framed monkey on the wall in your virtual home. But that sort of platform tie-in means it is basically the same as say the DRM-encoumbered media stores we've seen go bye - ownership which is only recognized within a platform is only really providing durable value to that platform.
I think these are the only technical arguments here, and there's real improvements there depending on what project you're looking at.
These fatal flaws have not prevented capitalism from blooming all over the world.
Lest you think I'm some species of these crypto libertarians, I believe it's an imperfect solution to hand humans more greed levers to go about life dictating their actions by perverse incentives.
The solution for me looks more like a free net whose power is contributed by a mass group of volunteers. But who then will run the datacenters? With what materials will they build them and who will freely give it to them?
Capitalism needs to be ripped up from its roots before we can have a hope of a free in all senses world for all. Until then, maybe we first take control of the machinery by replacing the currency with which the state does its business of violence.
I agreed up until your last sentence: is the state the bigger problem (versus multi-billion corps and capitalists)? is currency the main lever of states (versus diplomacy, infrastructures, military, etc)?
This strikes at one of my primary complaints with crypto/web3 discussions: Advocates switch between specific cryptocurrencies, cryptocurrency in general, and the concept of a blockchain in general as convenient for their arguments.
The concept of a cryptocurrency will always exist, but that doesn't mean that we can't be critical of the current financial shenanigans going on in the space.
If it helps, remember that the thing people talk about the most when discussing cryptocurrencies is always the price. But cryptocurrencies don't have any built-in notion of price. 1 BTC is 1 BTC. What people are really excited about is the exchanges and the on-ramps and off-ramps, which have nothing to do with the blockchain or cryptography.
Crypto bros do the same. Adoption - "look, Bitcoin", but its not working - "look, shitcoin1", but it's premined - "look, shitcoin2", but it's used by 3 persons including devs - "look, Bitcoin". And so on and on.
Isn't that like saying that what gets people really exciting about beer is the euphoric feeling after consuming it, which has nothing to do with the liquid itself?
If it wasn't for the exchanges and on- and off-ramps then cryptocurrencies wouldn't exist at all. Potentially spending it one day is the only thing that makes the crypto world go around.
"Spending" it doesn't require cashing it out in a hypothetical cryptocurrency future. People can, and do, transact in cryptocurrencies. Though it's actually quite painful, slow, expensive, and lacks all of the benefits of traditional transactions so everyone avoids it if possible.
But this exposes another flaw in the currency argument: If the on-ramps and off-ramps were to become so cheap, fast, and ubiquitous that we could transact instantly in cryptocurrencies for free, then suddenly the underlying coins wouldn't need to have any speculative value. If I could click "buy" on a product and the exchange into crypto, transfer, and end-user exchange out of crypto was basically instant, then the exchange rate doesn't actually matter at all because I'm only holding for a brief instant. Yet that would break the speculative use case entirely, so the hype tends to follow the deliberately inefficient coins. Crypto proponents don't actually want cryptocurrency to be easy to use. They only want you to buy it, then do nothing with it. Ever. If you lose it, even better (for everyone else).
It’s really not. For several years, paying with crypto has been faster and easier than credit card or PayPal.
No arbitrary blocks, guessing traffic lights, aligning shipping and billing names and zip codes, figuring which card will work for what country and payment processor, biyearly renewals, SMS confirmations, risk of having it abused despite having good opsec, being on the phone with PayPal, etc etc.
I just open my wallet, unlock it used my preferred method, [scan a qr code/copy-paste something], click OK, done.
I understand that many people on HN get profiled “white” enough by “the algorithms” to not have to experience the Kafkaesque frustration of the status quo.
For the rest of us, cryptocurrency is faster, easier, and sometimes cheaper. Today.
It's easy for me to make that case. Ransomware aside, there's no underlying value in cryptocurrency, unlike currencies which have the full faith and credit of governments. This is a fundamental problem that I see no way around.
My stuffed animal from when I was a baby has no "value", but I find it quite valuable. This isn't pendantics either - it determines more or less your entire economic perspective. If you believe in a utility or labor theory of value, of course crypto is a scam. A subjective theory? Not so much.
If someone trades an ETH for a Dollar, has value been changed? Moved around? Created? Has someone been scammed? Has wealth been created? Has net happiness been increased? Value is an extremely non-trivial thing and will lead you to love or hate the exact same situation depending on your chosen definition.
At any rate, I agree, crypto contains no value intrinsically. That said, I'm buying at the current price!
Those crypto-fans who are saying "ah well the -network- has intrinsic value" are missing the point. Value does not exist in the world. Value is like beauty or color - it's a subjective experience. All statements in the form of "X has no value" must be concatenated with "to me".
If anyone finds this incredibly interesting, and a fairly ignored part of epistemology, I strongly recommend reading Carl Menger's "The Origin of Money"
Food and shelter have value which is pretty near to objective. In fact it is routinely used to compare economic levels throughout history or societies. In fact it's quite useful to distinguish market price from usage (intrinsic) value. Usage value is variable from individual to individual, but there is a hierarchy of things we usually agree on, at the bottom being water, then food, then light, ... (biological stuff) then social interactions, intellectual stimulation, ... (more complex social stuff), then things like healthcare or gun access which will obviously depend on your political ethic (but which still are largely clustered, just not universal). So sure market price doesn't denote value, and intrinsic value is a fuzzy hierachy that is more and more precise given more and more assumptions on social norms, but the bottom of this hierachy is non-trivial (not everything at 0) and the top isn't that diverse.
Marx & Engels had a (critical) theory of capitalistic value where value is actually pretty well defined, as the amount of human work which has gone into something. That may be seen as an extension of what i first said (the value of human time being at least cost of life for that time).
So sure, most reasonable people would agree on food and water - but that's introducing a very very powerful new actor - your ability to judge other peoples actions as reasonable or rational. If you reserve that right - then sure, let's call crypto irrational - let's stand on the sidelines and say "well I wouldn't do that!" - let's start building the hierarchy of "reasonable values". I'm only suggesting that our ability to call someone else's valuation irrational behavior is dubious at best and aggressively violent, the birth of social engineering, the sourge of humanity, at worst (hyperbole maybe, but maybe not).
That impulse to guide "rationality" is exactly why we have modern monetary policy, and the only philosophical reason to like cryptocurrencies: a well designed, well distributed immutable ledger is more or less immune from such "guidance".
Edit: Obviously, I disagree strongly with the labor theory of value. I don't have anything handy, but there is a lot written on this (and I think the labor theory of value is fairly well demolished!). Let me know and I'd be happy to send links!
About your pick on judging other and building a hierarchy of reasonable values: well that's politics/ethics/moral (i'm no philosopher so i don't fully understand the difference between these concepts)! I'm not here saying there a is a total order between value systems, mostly a partial order based on inclusion/precision. And i'm asserting that whatever the set of living things you're taking, they'll have a non-trivial greatest lower bound (eg there is a common notion of intrinsic value) (but i think you got that).
About rationality: perhaps we don't understand the same thing by rationality but i believe one cannot be irrational, it's kinda vacuous. One can be in irrational with respect to some value system, but every one is (boundedly) rational with respect to his values (and it's by this axiom that we can infer peoples value systems). My comparison of value systems isn't on qualitative comparison between alternatives (me good you bad), it's a comparison on commonness/shared-base (this specific to me, this specific to you, this common).
on your edit: :) you feel nice to disagree with, send already, but i'm not promising i'll read! Btw i'm not sure i'll actually disagree with such critics, i personally don't really believe in value (as a homogeneous unit) because different things aren't always comparable and even different orders of magnitude of the same thing aren't always comparable (i've got no value for 0.01 house or 100 house, or more precisely it's not 0.01 resp 100 times my value for 1 house).
Many people will be selling at the same time, and suddenly the subjective value for everyone will be lower because it will be easier and easier to buy it.
My sense is that there is a cap on the demand for purchasing crypto, but the supply is very low because mining decreases over time, and generally people holding lots of crypto are younger and have no need to sell in order to pay for things, they can just pay with their fiat income.
This equation will change drastically as people start to retire and need to sell lots of crypto in order to fund their lifestyle without working.
Bitcoin slows down ensuring it's value continues to increase with fewer buyers.
Proper retirement planning means moving from 100% risky in your 20s to 50/50 in your 40s to 10/90 in your 60s.
When you try to take a digital currency and exchange it for digital items and digital ownership, you do so in a realm where "information wants to be free" - ownership of data is not often as interesting a concept as you want.
Finally, when you try to exchange digital currency for physical goods, you start to realize ownership itself only means anything as part of the existing legal constructs - a distributed ledger "title" will only be valid when the government says it is, and a successfully executed smart contract can be effectively overturned by a judge's order.
The parties/exchanges that don't acknowledge any of this and push the decentralized, out-of-government-control messaging seem like they are tending to be the ones who are structured corporately to be highly resistant to being taken to court over false claims by their customers/victims.
Many cryptocurrencies have been ruled securities. Securities are not "currencies", but still have value, don't they? Even if it is just speculative value (you don't know whether the underlying business is goiong to be successful, or if it is even a scam).
Of course, there is a value: it's a decentralized write-only database that can be used for things like proof of ownership without the requirement of a central authority. A famous use-case is the illicit online drug trade, which cannot currently be achieved (to my knowledge) with fiat currencies.
It might never replace government-backed currencies (or it just might, who knows), but to say it literally has no utility betrays a lack of knowledge about the system.
Hmmm... centralized and opaque/corrupt. So like a traditional bank?
> please tell me why are we replicating them them again but in worse way?
But this is just your disputed opinion. It is like asking "why is Kanye always singing and selling bad new songs, and we already have the beatles". Because they can and want to.
It allows proof ownership without proof of identity.
This is outside of IP or laws. You can move money without laws.
NFT are a differet topic. NFT are a way of having a digital token attached to something that can be used to determine ownership to an account. Do they need to be decentralized? No but it opens up ownership to all not just the approved.
When a currency goes through hyperinflation, that generally happens because the government goes crazy printing the currency and the trust that others have in accepting the currency goes down.
If crypto collapses, it will likely be because it just becomes computationally infeasible to work with. The problem with the blockchain is that every action on the blockchain requires the whole blockchain. As time goes on simply storing the blockchain will be something that's simply not reasonable.
An issue specifically with bitcoin is that as time goes on, transferring a single coin in a day, month, or year becomes computationally impossible. Bitcoin is quickly rushing to a point where holders of bitcoin will be incapable of trading it.
That, IMO, will be the collapse of crypto. If you can't move the currency, it doesn't matter how much others value it. It'll become a game of hot potato. with the last few holders getting more and more desperate to unload the potato for money.
At this point currency is an abstraction relying on computers. I handle cash personally once a month.
Amazon cashier-less stores are just as much to normalize the behavior of not paying as reducing jobs).
Producing currency, securing it, moving it, the old banking infra just for finance management has a huge environmental impact.
Banks are easily socially engineered. Corruption is rife.
Eth shouldn’t be pegged to a dollar. It’s not a currency. It’s an information network.
What crypto should be is not property but the technical network abstraction we develop and roll over.
Grifters are trying to generate traditional wealth off the idea it’s a literal thing but we could just keep rolling new protocols out. Up to you to store your work.
It’s a logical substrate for transmitting and storing information that can’t be monopolized like physical money if we see it as such.
Unlike banks with full vaults, ephemeral network control can be coded out. No one person can become a black hole with disproportionate pull on social agency.
Let's just listen to the man himself for a second, while we're talking about star trek and money: https://youtu.be/PV4Oze9JEU0?t=143
I guess you could argue that NFTs isn't the main aspect of cryptocurrencies, and I think you'd be right, but I find cryptocurrency projects in general seem to lean heavily into the scarcity aspect, and promise that early adopters will be able to cash in that scarcity later.
Not even a major aspect. Just like neither are the main aspect(s) of Web3.
Despite what con artists and puppet farms on Reddit and Twitter are pushing.
(The web3 moniker in its current form came years before the first NFT contract)
Promoted by people who think government is a terrible idea, an idea so terrible that literally every large group of people invented it.
Of course if I had mined some bitcoin when it was new, I'd be telling you how great it was to ensure my own profits
I don't know if government is a terrible idea, but if you agree that monopolies are a terrible idea then maybe at least you should give people against the concept of a government some attention regarding the "monopoly on violence" contradiction that's pretty much alive in all forms of government in place today.
If you want to gather 100,000 of your most random friends and try a new idea though, that's great.
But history suggests you'll invent government.
History suggests what the stable state of something is as much as reading tea leafs suggests it.
Many groups have tried to live without government, which have succeeded at scale?
It's kind of how I feel about crypto – cautiously observing, investing money I can afford to lose, toying with ideas on how and which real problems it could solve, and doing my best to ignore the parts that smell like pure hype, MLMs, and land grabs.
There is something here and I don't know what yet. I doubt NFTs are it. And we already know it doesn't quite work as a currency.
Cui bono as they say. Crypto won't fail because of the group that is driving most of the demand. It's a small group of people with lots of money. If it was a big group of people with little money, you could make the case that cryptocurrencies will fail. It's success has little to do with the math and quality of the technology.
Alt-coins/shitcoins are grifts, they can be worth what people want to pay but anyone can spin up a new coin. And they do. Pump and dump for chumps.
NFTs are the same. Anyone can create an NFT for whatever. There is no value in it whatsoever.
(Probably not though.)
I’d rather interact with cosplaying nerds than with those haughty-taughty process and procedure geeks.
[1]: I of course have not watched that, either.
The interest in it is purely because of the vast problems it creates are opportunities to gain something. These are numerous compared to the roughly single benefit and the technology itself.
It’s yet another market created to manipulate arbitrary wealth tokens. The masters are different that is all.
Easy to destroy a poorly constructed argument.
Those who could have a well constructed argument often choose to spend their explanation energy on those who are less skeptical.
For context, I never watched Star Trek. I'd read stories about fans and it always struck me as the dorkiest possible show, with unabashed nerdiness making something like the Big Bang Theory look like a sophisticated work of art.
But one day, I listened to a podcast about strength training and a question came up about which Star Trek leader the host liked more. And I was struck by how they described them. They were leaders. Competent, skilled, and wise men.
This is not the impression I got listening from their rabid fans who were at their worst, at the far end of this (at least on first and worst impressions).
I'd watch some scenes and it was in some respects closer to sci-fi Shakespeare than anything else. And so this gap between reality and impression stuck with me. How could I be so swayed by the worst version of something that never existed?
Years later and the rabid users of cryptocurrency rile me up. There's so much abuse and corruption happening in this space, metered with gambling addictions and delusions.
But the math and incentives are there. It would hard for me to make a case that eventually cryptocurrency will fail. There's a wide surface area of financial problems that even fintech hasn't solved yet. And a whole bunch of problems who we don't even realize exist that can one day be solved by these new mathematical properties embedded into software.
So I'm not too keen on stepping too deeply into the cynicism. I'd like to wait without a final judgement on what it might become.
I don't want to miss out on who Captain Picard might become.