> Today the global community of technologists sent a letter to Congress

Bullshit. As a member of the "global community of technologists", I sent no such letter to Congress nor did I appoint anyone to send a letter on my behalf.

I don't even see a point in addressing the same old anti-crypto arguments contained in the letter. The real story here is the presumption of these self-appointed "respected scholars and technologists".

Here is what a fairly prominent member of the global community of technologists, DHH, who is a known Bitcoin-sceptic thinks now:

https://world.hey.com/dhh/i-was-wrong-we-need-crypto-587ccb0...

> It's on us as citizens and responsible engineers to help fix the problem we created by our inaction.

Engineers don't fix problems by begging the government to create laws that will throw people in jail for using a given technology in a way they don't like.

If all blockchain is bad because 99.9% of tokens fail, why wouldn’t all startups be bad since a similar number fail as well?

I think, Because startup investment is regulated and not accessible to any average joe. Else, we'd be overrun with conmen trying to make a quick buck. Not that we have less of them now.

Is startup investing really regulated, or is it just your mom and dad and nobody else who have heard about your statup?

- ”Dad, all I need is 10k loan” - ”I will give you the money, son. And I’ll see you in court if it doesn’t work out.”

Securities are regulated, snd startups which try to collect cash from the public become securities

The government is letting crowd funding happen and the public can still lose a lot of money even when there are disclosures.

WeFunder and StartEngine are accessible to the average person.

There's a reason random startups aren't allowed to make IPOs directly to the public, and attempts to circumvent this with ICOs got the hammer brought down on them.

Exactly. Unregistered ICOs are illegal in the US which is what happened after 2017. [0] More countries to follow banning them for sure.

[0] https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-reso...

We have WeFunder and StartEngine. I'm sure there are a few others by now as well.

the result of this is people can only buy virgin galactic when they actually want to buy spacex. seems misguided

Seems to be going great for Stripe [0] and Moneygram [1] and FIDE Online Arena [2], but obviously crypto-skeptics and crypto-maximalists will not tell you that. Perhaps these companies waited for this executive order: [3] to go through before getting back into using cryptocurrencies.

The reality is that both the hard crypto-skeptics and the crypto-maximalists will be disappointed in achieving their utopian goals of fully stopping crypto and also gaining full adoption of it.

Only a few of them will survive the test of time and further regulations.

[0] https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-29/moneygram...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2020-06-23/algorand...

[3] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

> Seems to be going great for Stripe [0] and Moneygram [1] and FIDE Online Arena [2], but obviously crypto-skeptics and crypto-maximalists will not tell you that.

It must be going disastrously when your 3 examples of things going grate are a start of a pilot project, an announcement of a project and what seems to amount to a sponsorship deal. And you wonder why people don't speak more widely about it.

So those 3 projects I linked to have all been scrapped, abandoned or cancelled?, which would qualify your claim as what you described as 'going disastrously' assuming you have read the whole article and its links then?

Can you at least backup your claims on them 'going disastrously' and being cancelled, scrapped or abandoned rather than making very unsubstantiated and baseless claims? Since I have already backed up my claims with links that these projects are still alive?

> And you wonder why people don't speak more widely about it.

Or is it because these companies know that the ones they selected are suitable for their use cases and are compliant with regulations and are not part of this extreme 'all cryptocurrencies is scam, ponzi, planet incinerating' narrative that these 'technologists' are pushing?

> Since I have already backed up my claims with links that these projects are still alive?

No you did not. You provided a link to a closed pilot project that started a month ago, technically not alive and no way for you to know if it is going great. A link to an announcement of starting a project in the future, so not alive and no way for you to know that it is going great. Finally you provided a link to a "project" that amounts to nothing more than a sponsorship deal.

Yes I have. There is a problem with your goal-post moving, dodging questions and continuous denial as an attempt to escape my questions.

> You provided a link to a closed pilot project that started a month ago, technically not alive and no way for you to know if it is going great.

So "technically" it is not cancelled, scrapped or abandoned then and the project is still alive. Yes or No? Where is this 'disaster' you are speaking of since they are still launching it?

It seems you have admitted that it is still alive and going great by attempting to deny and shift the goal posts!

> A link to an announcement of starting a project in the future, so not alive and no way for you to know that it is going great.

In that link as of today, who is the partner that is using this crypto payouts product right now? Has that one been cancelled too?

> Finally you provided a link to a "project" that amounts to nothing more than a sponsorship deal.

And since then somehow they didn't use it and it was cancelled or abandoned, therefore a 'disaster' and they are not using it? My suspicions suggest that you read as far as the headline.

So not only you have just admitted that you're yet to read them, none of your responses are a refutation to my claims as you continue to dodge the fact that these projects are still alive and once again unable to give a single link to backup your own so-called claims of all of them going 'disastrously'.

You could replace “crypto” with “web” and it would make these statements equally broad and absurd.

This is the very definition of a shallow dismissal. You are trying to insinuate that people who believe crypto is bad technology and bad for society, are doing the equivalent of arguing that the web is bad technology and bad for society.

But 1) the arguments against crypto are specific to crypto; 2) the very people who are arguing against crypto are the same people who have been the most vocal advocates of an open web; 3) this is a dismissal from a technologist perspective of the finance industry's self-interested pro-crypto lobbying - there's no obvious parallel of an industry lobbying for 'pro-web' policy over technologists' objections that you can analogize this to. If anything, web-related regulatory discussions in the 1990s were the opposite - entrenched industries lobbying against technological arguments.

> This is the very definition of a shallow dismissal

Short and succinct is not the same as shallow.

> You are trying to insinuate that people who believe crypto is bad technology and bad for society, are doing the equivalent of arguing that the web is bad technology and bad for society.

I’m not insinuating anything, I’m explicitly saying that is the case.

> 1) the arguments against crypto are specific to crypto

“Crypto” is so broad, there’s no such thing as an argument specific to crypto. Are you saying all crypto-related data structures, protocols, and algorithms are de-facto bad for society (and thereby anything that stems from them)?

If so, that argument sounds blatantly absurd to me. And if not, then your argument is so non-specific it’s meaningless.

> Short and succinct is not the same as shallow.

No it isn't. Which is presumably why they didn't use those words.

Who are you trying to fool with this? All web3 and cryptocurrency projects trace their lineage back to the Bitcoin paper, and they include or interface with some permutation on a blockchain modelled totally or substantially on Bitcoin's blockchain. Projects of that nature fall under the term crypto. Pretty sure you could figure that out just from the Super Bowl commercials.

Critics of crypto are almost always objecting to its use as a financial instrument, or as a way to technologically convert social relations into markets (as in the case of "play-to-earn" games turning MMO guilds into a peasant-lord economic relation, fun fun fun). There are already substantial, standing arguments against all of the meaningful permutations/additions to the blockchain technology (NFTs, DAOs, stablecoins, proof of stake...).

These arguments are not necessary because in practice every crypto project to date has been a scam, an inefficient implementation of something that already exists (either slower, more wasteful, or not fixing any of the problems that it points out in its traditional equivalent), or is just an unregulated security. The self-proclaimed geniuses that develop crypto projects have spent the last decade rediscovering all of the pitfalls that led to the present-day financial system they so badly want to disrupt, and losing gullible people's money doing it.

The core of crypto, in my opinion and explicitly in Bitcoin, is "trustless money" but crypto is only trustless in the abstract. We have to have trust that the developers of our coin didn't make any mistakes. We have to trust that the coin will not just fork if a rich guy loses money (like Ethereum did in the 2016 DAO attack).

If we want to build something complicated we have to trust that the smart contract developers are not malicious and made no mistakes. Obvious counter to this is that they are open source, but we're not talking about trustless money for programmers. Some will say that "the market" will figure out who to trust through adoption but in empirical reality this has not been the case.

I am not an economist, but basic observation also tells us that an asset that fluctuates as wildly as Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is also not good as a currency. Transaction are also slow and expensive, and any crypto project that purports to solve this problem may want to check out a similar little technology called "Visa".

We can hate the way central banking is done, but developers really need to come to terms with the fact that we have had far too many technological fixes for social problems. Many crypto projects promise many things, but I ultimately trust a central, predictable authority (even if it's corrupt) more than some guy operating in a field that, time and time again, just takes peoples money and runs.

I want to see crypto remain 100% legal but get taxed fairly, because everyone who is pretending it's the future will immediately liquidate their assets and leave.

There are plenty of far worse life destroying scams that we don't regulate. Variable interest rate loans are a huge example.

Variable interest rate loans are very tightly regulated. You could argue 'not tightly enough', but personal loans in general are probably one of the most tightly regulated industries there is.

If they're legal at all they're probably not tightly regulated enough. They're certainly not well regulated enough now, you have morons on YouTube telling each other to buy investment properties with HELOC loans. IMO that's a far larger issue than people blowing money on worthless crypto tokens.