> Parent comment linked to a bunch of projects with promise

We've had over 10 years of crypto. At some point it'd be nice if we moved past "projects with promise" to "projects that lived up to their promises".

So far? All we have is an ecosystem that enables gambling and a truly astonishing amount of fraud.

So I have to ask: How much longer should we wait? Five more years? Ten? Or do we just keep waiting because the faith is unshakeable?

It's hard to argue with them because they have a financial stake in the system, it's in their interest to spread it as far and wide as possible because it will enrich them. Money clouds judgement. The hope for global adoption just means "I got in first so I deserve to be rewarded". An honest answer would be that no one care about all the technology as long as number goes up. Now as they usually say, cope and seethe, nocoiner.

The classic "feel free to stay poor, everyone will use [coin] in X years and it'll be worth Y million $€" answer.

Smells rather desperate in the crypto mines, doesn't it.

It's hard to argue with your philosophy because the goal posts never stop moving.

Bitcoin worth anything above $0 would have been an absurd thought 10 years ago, now it's a global asset class worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Unstoppable money not backed by any state is an amazing accomplishment. This alone is a mind blowing fact to me, but again, to the HN crypto hater it's meaningless, because the definition of "success" is constantly moving.

Blockchain and finance are deeply intertwined, so a lot of applications built on digital financial rails (blockchains) are naturally around capital formation, derivatives, trading, etc. but to the socialist / statist that should be outlawed (not just in crypto but likely Wall Street itself) so that isn't anything to you.

One counterpoint is the HN shibboleth of Stripe. Stripe is barely a tweak on PayPal, or at least it was at first, yet everyone on HN ejaculated in amazement at the ability to take a credit card with a javascript function. Of course I think Stripe is a great company, I just want to put into context how on HackerNews, Stripe = "Amazing incredible glorious $100 billion epic company" and cryptocurrency = "Wow a trillion dollar asset built on pure computer science and economic principles created by mysterious cypherpunk, who cares".

> It's hard to argue with your philosophy because the goal posts never stop moving.

I'm not the one that picked that list of projects. You're the one who described them as having "promise", not me.

If there's some projects out there that have lived up to their promises and aren't just gambling enablement, please, list them!

I'll take a quick crack at a few:

Helium, which actually purported to use crypto to build a real-world impacting product? Fraud.

NFTs generally? Speculation, gambling, mostly fraud, rug manufacture (not in the textile sense).

Exchanges, derivatives, "yield" farming, etc. Mix of gambling, fraud, and simple wealth transfers.

Various DAO-style projects. My favourite is projects like Spice, buying real-world assets to leverage them in some way. All failures, some comically so.

Cheap money transfers? Nope. Gas fees, etc.

Store of value? Nope. Massively volatile.

Currency usable for real-world purchases/transactions? Nope. Too slow (also gas fees, etc).

And now I'm at the limit of what comes up off the top of my head.

The fact that billions of dollars have swept into a massively speculative market during a period of historically low yields isn't a surprise. The prospect of wealth transfers from the gullible to the rich will always draw in investors. But that isn't evidence of actual value or success, unless your measure of success is "how many people got rich on the backs of a lot of losers".

So what am I missing?

The other side of the table is so clearly entrenched in their viewpoint that I just laugh now.

Someone asking me at the bar "but what's the value?" when they are an experienced technologist does not get my engagement. They haven't done enough homework to even propose a potential answer to the question they're nongenuinely asking

It has been interesting. The liberal technology community is so emboldened by "muh environment" FUD this cycle that they're actually more blind to the growing sector than ever before.

Ultimately, for the finance-minded developer, there is a gargantuan shortage of web3/crypto devs. I'm not talking about scammy VC web3. I'm referring to the people capable of building what's coming. Overnight, every company is gonna need devs and the shortage will be exaggerated.

It's all optics, their supposed "progressive" view. Wealthy people angry that GPUs got so expensive, overpowered energy suckers they'd gladly use for high-end gaming whilst having the AC on full blast. Nobody cares one bit about high energy use. Calling out crypto is a great distraction though to virtue signal that you're "on the good side".

As was the case with the Mozilla incident. Mozilla had been accepting crypto donations for many years. Until somehow this got back into the news and some influential "progressives" applied the very typical mob pressure, forcing Mozilla to stop.

And all is right again in the world. Except that people willing to give crypto (which is a form of money) now won't or can't. Less income for Mozilla whilst crypto in itself is in absolutely no way harmed. It's still there, same energy use, I guess it will now be spent elsewhere.

That's the new progressive. Obsessively cleaning your self-image, whilst outcomes are completely ignored or achieve the exact opposite.

We just had a $30B PoS coin/stablecoin platform evaporate into thin air this year, don’t even need to bring up Visa lol

And Deutsch Bank laundered hundreds of billions of euros for drug lords. What system is flawed again?

Is there a mechanism in place to stop people from laundering money with ethereum? This is a serious question, I’m a total noob when it comes to crypto.

You can’t stop crime, otherwise murder wouldn’t happen. If you give people a modicum of freedom then some amount of them will act with criminal intent.

Arguably the blockchain makes detecting and prosecuting money laundering easier than our opaque legacy financial system.

Right, in the same way that in the hypothetical Blockchain utopia anyone seeing you eat at a coffeeshop can also see what porn sites you visit, how often you shop at the dispensary, and which escorts you prefer to visit.

I can think both are bad.