This comment hits the nail on the head. Just this morning when I saw FTX and BlockFi's news I thought to myself "yeah all the electricity spent on this is bad, but the real problem is how many hours of human thought have been spent on coming up with these schemes just for them to blow up on our faces".
Crypto is like the mental virus in the movie "Pontypool" [0] - people are infected by it and cannot think about anything else.
Re:Tether's Troubles in November 2022
by mrbombastic on Friday November 11, 2022 @07:51PM
(#33568795)
Is there a term for this type of highly interesting problem that is ultimately a waste of time? I have been calling it a “brain sink”in my head, it is deeply sad to me how many smart people have jumped on the bandwagon and what they could have done otherwise with their potential.
XKCD: https://xkcd.com/356/
Now that the world is hyper connected we should expect an increasing number of increasingly virulent memetic plagues like this to emerge. Be skeptical out there.
If crypto didn't exist, these people would either go to wallstreet, or play poker.
I wish that were true. But sadly I think crypto's gravitational pull has yanked in plenty of folks that could have accomplished great things (for themselves or others).
The potent mix of greed, exclusivity, and novelty applied at the right time someone's life can ruin just about anyone.
Cryptocurrency kind of reminds me of that Star Trek episode where they were going to destroy the Borg by giving them this impossible n-dimensional object to ponder. It had no solution but was infinitely interesting so they would ponder it, and ponder it, enlisting more and more minds in the collective until the entire Borg were occupied doing nothing but considering this shape. Cryptocurrency kind of seems to have done that to hacker culture. It's infinitely technically fascinating and pushes all the right cyber-libertarian buttons so it sucks in more and more resources forever but amounts to nothing.