It hasn't been overcome in 15 years but they will fix it soon. Sure...

Software isn't some magic that can wish away its shorcomings.

Also, do you think the next instagram that will most like support its own crypto will allow you to switch to a different crypto?

ETA: the transaction cost is based on the cryptocurrency, so if now the cost per transaction is 1 cent then in 10 years it might cost 10 dollars if the value of the coin goes up.

Because cryptocurrencies are dependent on the reliability of distributed systems and cryptography. Both concepts are extremely tricky, the only true way of validating them is by trying to break them and failing, this takes time. But the floodgates have been opened.

Also, who cares if there are several cryptocurrencies? If they have good properties (fundamentals) and people find them valuable, why not?

You don't get these tradeoffs for free though. Anyone can make a "crypto currency" that is entirely centralised and has no fees and minimal environmental impact. Nobody would use it. I think much of the desire of crypto comes from being decentralised, and I am yet to see a crypto that doesn't use PoW that doesn't just favor those who are already rich.

PoW also favors those who are already rich it's just abstracted by one layer of them having to buy rigs for mining farms, instead of being hard-coded in the same way as PoS.

Well, I can honestly tell you such a cryptocurrency exists. Cryptocurrencies are byzantine-fault-tolerant consensus algorithms. These are tricky algorithms to get right, but I can assure you that Bitcoin is not the only viable solution. In fact, I don't understand people's pessimism. In the universe of all possible algorithms of this kind, known and unknown, I find extremely unlikely that Bitcoin-like ones would be the best and only possibility!

There you go. Cryptocurrencies are here to stay no matter how much they hate it or continue to waste time on repeating the same old arguments even though there are far better cryptocurrencies out there that already exist.

The fact that they are unable to ignore them and continue to spread the same debunked nonsense tells you that it is not going away and it is getting boring.

Just look at the first few sentences:

> a slow distributed, append only spreadsheet technology which is destroying the planet we live on.

So Solana, Stellar and Algorand are destroying the planet?

> Blockchain isn't new. It has been around for as long as the iPhone. Look how much the iPhone has changed the world. Blockchains one claim to fame in this period is the creation of $5.2B/year ransomware industry, societal damage in the form of gambling and the loss of irreplaceable photos.

The internet isn't new. Its 'killer app' (The world wide web) came decades afterwards and it took decades more for adoption. I don't know why one would try to use ransomware on transparent and traceable blockchains these days, where everyone can see where it is going, unless you are using 'privacy coins' which those are getting banned due to regulations.

All of that did not stop Stripe to continue supporting cryptocurrencies for payments [0], did it? It's really getting boring repeating the same old arguments from critics like Stephen Diehl [1] who is unable to ignore the whole thing after his failed blockchain startup venture Adjoint. [2] That's why he is grieving and wasting his energy towards cryptocurrencies.

[0] https://stripe.com/gb/use-cases/crypto

[1] https://twitter.com/smdiehl

[2] https://twitter.com/dystopiabreaker/status/14701269278180679...

> The internet isn't new. Its 'killer app' (The world wide web) came decades afterwards and took decades more for adoption.

The Internet started in the mid 1980s and became available to consumers in about '89[0]. The WWW was created in '90. By '94 it was wildly popular. Netscape IPOed the next year, with millions of users.

Generously, you could call that about 5 years from public availability to cultural dominance. Bitcoin has existed for three times that, and still doesn't have a use case that Beanie Babies didn't have.

I'm a believer in cryptocurrencies - or, I should say, in decentralised digital cash. But people like you are hurting it, not helping it. We need rational discussion that can soberly evaluate the flaws of a given implementation, not unthinking heavily-emotionalised tribalism.

[0] Incidentally, David Chaum founded DigiCash, the first cryptocurrency company, the same year.

The first version of the internet was called Arpanet and it was apparently released in 1969 according to Wikipedia. It only became widespread in its current incarnation much later. Moreover, there was an immense amount of hype around the internet during the 90s that culminated in the dotcom bubble, wiping out most ventures and leaving only few companies which still exist today.

If you ask me, the story of the internet and cryptocurrencies seems pretty similar.

Yeah, Arpanet was definitely a wide-area network, but the Internet Protocol was standardised in '82 and that was what created the Internet: a public network that was capable of spanning the globe. (I used the words "became publicly available" advisedly!)

Aside from that, I very much agree with you. I think digital cash has great promise - I can't imagine Visa and Mastercard still being a thing in 20-30 years. Some implementation of digital cash - I happen to think Bitcoin and its current siblings are not fit solutions - seems highly likely to proliferate in actual means-of-exchange usage. (In plain English: for buying stuff at supermarkets.)

But I think people like the commenter above are the obstacle to progress. We need motivated but rational innovators, who can analyse solutions through clear eyes, soberly and without dysfunctional ego investment in one technology or another.

These weird crypto stans are not technologists, they're fanboys, they make real innovators look bad, and they retard real progress by dementedly screaming at anyone who makes cogent criticisms of a given implementation. Those critics are our greatest asset and friend, not our enemy.

> I can't imagine Visa and Mastercard still being a thing in 20-30 years.

You think the blockchain is going to give you a credit limit?

There’s a reason I’m saying ‘digital cash’. I carry no water for current cryptocurrencies or blockchains. I’m interested in the goal, not any implementation (and what frustrates me about these crypto stans is their ego fixation on the implementation and the culture/brand/Lamborghinis over the goal).

As for credit limits: first off, Visa and Mastercard are payment systems - they don’t give you credit limits. Your card has ‘Visa’ or ‘Mastercard’ written on it, but it’s your bank that lends you the money to spend via V/M. I’m not proposing that the bank be replaced - I’m proposing that the payment system be replaced. Your bank will lend you money, and you will spend it using [tbd].

(BTW, I developed the lending algorithms at a unicorn startup bank. Billions in credit was dispensed by my code [and that of my reports]. I’m intimately familiar with that ecosystem. It’s not my central point here, but I do believe there’s substantial room for modernisation in that respect at almost every point in the chain: the CRAs, the lenders, the collections agencies, etc. If you’re interested, I’d be happy to expand, but right here I don’t want to distract from my actual point above.)

The web wasn't publicly available until 1992, which is why there was so much hype around it in the 90s. Both eBay and Amazon were started within two years of the web being opened as part of what started as the dot-com boom and became the dot-com bubble a few years later.

The time between the web opening and the end of the dot-com boom is about the same as the time between Bitcoin being announced and Ethereum going live, a period in which barely anyone used crypto and it had almost zero impact on the world. Even since then its wider impact is minute compared to what came from the dot-com boom.

Not one time in my sentence did I ever mention about Bitcoin. That one has already failed in being 'electronic cash' and it is now used as 'digital gold'. Not its intended purpose. The others that I mentioned have a much better future of being a 'digital cash' technology if used with a stablecoin.

> But people like you are hurting it, not helping it.

How exactly?

> We need rational discussion that can soberly evaluate the flaws of a given implementation, not unthinking heavily-emotionalised tribalism.

I have just counter argued my points made with real examples and evidence and the only person arguing with emotion are the creators of the 'Welcome to Web 3.0' page. And yes, I can even critique the aforementioned cryptocurrencies since every technology still always has it issues.

But just don't repeat the same arguments that I have just refuted. It is boring and I am only interested in looking for new criticisms. All my earlier points and questions about it being, slow, 'destroying the planet', etc still remain unchallenged.

> The underlying technology is valuable

Is it though? Valuable how? Has it been proven?

The core of the issue is that PoW is fundamentally a sort of algorithmic cancer that threatens to basically take over on the order of half of the worlds computational power to fuel worthless speculative trading. IMO there's an important argument to be had that trading on PoW blockchains should be outright banned. Yes, you can't get rid of it completely, but you can get the impact down to a manageable level.. like with cancers.

And yeah, then you have PoS and PoA blockchains. But it's yet to be proven that PoS provides the same level of security as PoW, and there's solid arguments that it never possibly could. PoA is fundamentally different from PoW and PoS, so you can argue whether it's even the same underlying thing. It's no longer truly decentralized. I think it could be very useful. It's just not as sexy and susceptible to fueling pyramid schemes, so it's less popular.

So to me it seems like we really don't know at all yet if the "underlying technology" is even providing a net positive value to society.

If the "underlying technology" here is trustless distributed blockchains (that is, PoA doesn't really apply), then I think there's an argument that the core of the idea is fundamentally broken. There is perhaps no such thing as a truly trustless system (for PoW/PoS blockchain, you're just converging on concentrating de-facto trust with a small clique of trading platforms and mining/wallet app developers), so maybe it's better to just be more explicit about where we're placing our trust (through solid cryptography if we can) and to make sure that those entities are democratic institutions worthy of our trust. But this quickly becomes a very deep and philosophical argument, so it's outside the scope of this comment.

I support further research and development into blockchain-related technology, I certainly think it could be truly valuable. But it's yet to be proven IMO.

> But it's yet to be proven that PoS provides the same level of security as PoW, and there's solid arguments that it never possibly could.

Could you direct me to some of these arguments? My thought is the opposite, that something in the lines of PoS is more secure in the long-run because it tends towards decentralization. I guess the devil is in the details.

The main security difference is that with PoW any attempt to create a fork has a cost. With PoS, slashing can be used to impose a similar cost. But that doesn't work for very that long forks (longer than it takes for stakers to unbond), since the accounts being slashed might no longer exist on the main fork.

In order for validators to distinguish the main fork from any malicious long forks, they must start with a trusted checkpoint that's less than X days old, then sync at least every X days, where X is the unbonding period.

The "trusted checkpoint" notion seems to cause a lot of concern, but in my mind it's relatively harmless to just bake checkpoints into the client code (if done carefully - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29370309). Most clients already have some form of trusted checkpoints (even Bitcoin Core does, though they're deprecated), or at least a genesis block, which is effectively a checkpoint.

More here: https://eth.wiki/en/concepts/proof-of-stake-faqs#what-is-wea...

And some good discussion here: https://twitter.com/zooko/status/1045807027992182785

Listen, people understand that technology has value outside of the scams and stupid memes. The problem is that crypto-evangelists seem to think that good intentions are all you need to build a functioning alternate economy. "Don't mind the bugs, we'll fix them later, for now entrust us with all of your money and information". It is precisely because it is flawed software that people hate on NFTs and blockchain and web3. Fix your shit and self-regulate before you promise the future to people who are already struggling in the existing economy.

> The underlying technology is valuable and the problems it may have today can be overcome.

I'm pretty sure that's been said about email and its encryption/validation problem. And while it's still used, other products have come in and eaten its biggest market - asynchronous communication.

Inertia's a bitch, and when you have millions of users, you can't change things willy-nilly. At least, not if you want the product to be viewed as legitimate.