I work in this area and to me, the tech is still super interesting. In particular, things like zero knowledge proof and related scaling/privacy solutions are at the forefront of cryptography in my opinion.

I gave the "industry" a pretty thorough deep dive; I learned Solidity, wrote a bunch of smart contracts, tried a lot of DeFi, and listened to ~100 episodes of the Zero Knowledge podcast.

My impression on the other end of it is that the "tech" is interesting in a purely academic sense but most of the participants are building things they know have no use and engaging in a lot of motivated reasoning about the future to justify drawing money in from the outside.

Like, it can all be a lot of fun! And some techniques, like all ZK folding schemes, are mathematical magic. But, no one wants code to be law and pretty much no one should be managing private keys tied to money.

It's a very cool but failed idea.

We just need to find some non-speculative and non-scammy uses for that tech.

I think you'll see people picking those techniques and using them in a hidden-from-the-user way (like how git and BlueSky use Merkle trees)

Cryptocurrencies have not actually invented much new technology, they mostly combined existing ideas in new ways. Merkel trees, for example, are an almost 50 year old idea, zero-knowledge proof are almost 40 years old, proof of work predates Bitcoin by 15 years which makes it 30 years old.

I think the initial impractical prototypes for the core techniques were in the literature for a while but there's really no comparison between eg interactive ZK protocols and the succinct non-interactive proofs used by the cryptocurrency folks. The latter are computationally general (you don't have to roll a new one for each program) and many orders of magnitude more efficient.

I think it's important to give the cryptocurrency industry credit for the few corners in which it makes real (theory/tooling) contributions even if they're motivated by nonsense

I did not want to say that they invented or improved nothing, just that a lot of the building blocks already existed. I just looked this up, non-interactive zero-knowledge proof also seem to have a history back to the late 80s, but if cryptocurrencies gave us some improvements and new ideas that made them more practical, fine, I am not going to complain about that.

Like, huge tangible improvements.

You can do general purpose programming in all kinds of DSLs and Rust libraries that compiles down to big-but-practical arithmetic circuits and then generate proofs that y=f(x) without revealing x for arbitrary f. That really wasn't possible until a few years ago and emerged almost exclusively within the sphere of cryptocurrency-adjacent research. You can also use the succinctness of SNARKs to batch these proofs and shrink the verifier costs to almost nothing

It's a cool model for asymmetric computing, with low capacity verifiers collecting results from high capacity provers. It'll probably find uses outside deranged gambling...

Recent advances in SNARKs/STARKs/VDFs were funded by crypto. SNARKs have gone from unusably slow to reasonably efficient.

> I think you'll see people picking those techniques

Those techniques were already invented and in-use long beforehand though.

I think that needs emphasizing, because sometimes it feels like... Imagine that fans of the Segway claimed it will replace all other forms of transportation, and a worrying number of them are still out there crediting the (failing) product for inventing the wheel.

Merkle trees, yes! That was just an example of a technique that can be well hidden vs in the user's face.

Newer techniques like Verkle trees, SNARKs, STARKs, &c are.... well, new.

The way I see it, "blockchain" (NFTs, etc) are less technologies and more business-plans to make money--perhaps in a slightly more-literal sense than usual--from available tools.

It's kind of like ride-share services: They didn't invent cars or databases or dispatching systems or phone-apps, and while their investment might have spurred some new tools/libraries/algorithms, the usefulness of those inventions doesn't flow backward to mean they have a good/sustainable business.

There are even cases like "private blockchain" where the fad-marketing is getting used to mislabel what is actually just a regular old distributed database of yesteryear.

> They didn't invent cars

Can we really call the car an "invention"? After all, both the wheel and the steam engine already existed.

Those techniques were already invented and in-use long beforehand.

A solution in search of a problem? Maybe they could apply it to something like protecting a person's online identity rather than a digital coin/currency. Or something along the lines of Distributed Apps instead of DeFi.

There aren't any use cases for crypto technology except crypto. It relies on so many specific assumptions that none of the components make sense when taken out of context.

Haven't we be trying since the beginning?

Cheap and safe payments are of tremendous utility.

The problem is that anonymous payments are essentially illegal under current regulations designed to protect the large incumbent businesses.

Cryptocurrencies could render paywalls and signupwalls a thing of the past, allowing you to pay a fraction of a penny for a page view automatically in browser without an account.

Such systems are illegal.

Any payment that can’t be reversed after a dispute is inherently unsafe.

It's a different type of primitive, which can be used safely or unsafely. For example if you're selling something on craigslist, then it's unsafe to accept any form of payment that can be reversed after the item leaves.

There are some pretty big, obvious reason why true anonymous payments are illegal under a lot of regulations in different countries. Supporting current big businesses is pretty damn far down the list.

Yes, the reasons are big, but they aren't valid or useful unless you are a large incumbent (or the state itself).

I was with you until "pay a fraction of a penny for a page view". Trying to push the web back into the closed pay for access model is something that leaves a bad taste in many people's mouths. I'd say it's only a positive thing if it's funding new nodes working to route around existing attempts at artificial scarcity (to drive the price to within an epsilon of zero). But given the way the legal shakedown regime works we know it won't actually play out that way.

Drugs usually aren't a scam.

It's a decade now and there is still no real use case for it..

One and a half decades actually.

Your zero knowledge proof is not true.

We see the issues with it: 1. It moves the trust issue or 2. The trust is only on the Blockchain.

World exists in a physical world which doesn't allow you at all to use a Blockchain there.

And zero trust for your money also means zero recovery

It’s not going to just vanish because crypto has become the tool of choice for online scams and crime.

Here’s just one recent example, a small Kansas bank that collapsed entirely because its CEO got involved in a crypto scam:

“The chief executive officer of Heartland Tri-State Bank asked if the client would lend him $12 million so he could get his money out of a cryptocurrency investment. He promised he’d pay him back 10 days later, offering $1 million in interest to make it worth his while.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-27/crypto-sc...

Billions are being stolen annually using crypto. It’s the only use case with any traction.

For the same reason, governments are increasingly cracking down on crypto.

The conditions that created the 2011-2021 crypto booms were a combination of lack of regulation and zero interest rates, which made investors look for increasingly speculative investments. Those days aren’t coming back.

History of economics disagrees with the last -- hopeful I will assume -- statement. The world was and is full of scammers and fraudsters.

Also respectfully I am not sure I get the zero interest rates arguments. There seems to be a subgroup of HN community that believes low interest rates (below some arbitrary threshold?) to be immoral. Maybe there is a Crime, scams and ponzi schemes correlation study over hundreds of years I am unaware of? Japan is keeping negative rates and they are not known for that, to give the country everyone knows counterexample.

Besides that the main borrowers are countries themselves. And with US, Europe and China paths right now, amidst a global war tension, something will have to give long term to make ends meet. Usually it is currency devaluation and a fundamental systemic change.

Zero interest rates will most likely return one day, but crypto will be heavily regulated by then. That’s what I meant — the combo isn’t coming back where crypto is an unregulated sink for ZIRP speculation money.

Thank you for the clarification follow-up.

The zero interest rate comment has nothing to do with morality, it means that people were doing incredibly goofy, risky shit to get a return, which creates ripe ground for conmen and fraud.

ZIRP is somewhat overrated; the first dotcom bubble didn't have zero interest rates. But housing costs weren't as bad then as now, so maybe more room to mess up.

Lookie the thing is as long as interest rates are down, wages might go up nominally but in actual material terms you end up poorer. Unless you already own substantial hard assets or have access to the low interest rate loans. At the end of the day what matters is how many barrels of oil/kWh your monthly income can directly or indirectly be exchanged for.

> There seems to be a subgroup of HN community that believes low interest rates (below some arbitrary threshold?) to be immoral.

Ironically, this is a very popular belief in the Bitcoin community and often cited as the reason to adopt Bitcoin. I don't want to start a debate but essentially, the crux of the belief is that low interest rates are essentially a means of "printing money", which in turn dilutes the value of the currency and acts as a hidden tax on its holders. The idea being that Bitcoin having a fixed supply, isn't vulnerable to such debasement.

Drug dealers love U.S. bank notes, pedophiles exploit the anonymity of Tor, tax evaders hide behind Delaware LLCs, scammers use prepaid SIM cards and VPNs, bigots find a voice on platforms like 4Chan, and insurgents communicate through E2E encrypted messengers.

The unfortunate reality is, any tool or platform offering a high degree of privacy will inevitably draw those with nefarious intentions.

Stablecoins came close to moving as much value as visa in 2022 [1].

The use case for crypto has always been clear. There is a lot of demand for digital cash, some from people who operate outside of the law, but also from people who lack access to good banking and payments infrastructure (think activists, sex workers, citizens of nations with unreliable monetary systems).

Now that the speculative mania finally seems to have died down, what remains is what actually provides real value: a robust, modern and reliable financial infrastructure that provides privacy and does not make arbitrary decisions about who has access.

1: https://cryptopotato.com/stablecoins-settled-as-much-value-a...

Visa has at least 343 million cardholders worldwide.

Of course trying to determine crypto "users" is essentially impossible but even the most bloated and inflated estimates (users unique per chain, address = user) put the number somewhere around 300 million. Personally I think it's more like 50-100 million by the time you factor in users on different chains, different wallets, etc. I've spent a lot of time analyzing chains to come to that number, it's not difficult. Nearly every crypto user participates on more than one chain and often uses at least two addresses (hot and cold wallet, for example).

Sure enough, the quote is right there in the report:

"over 25 million blockchain addresses held over $1 in stablecoins"

25 million addresses, which absolutely don't equal users. Even if they did, that's .05% of global internet users (5.2 billion). With the threshold for inclusion at $1...

Of course you say "moving as much value" which doesn't necessarily correlate directly to users or their activity but I would venture to guess (if the report is accurate at all) that a substantial portion of that stablecoin "value" volume isn't anything resembling the economic activity of Visa where every swipe is in exchange for a good or service. At best settlement between exchanges but also wash trading and all kinds of weird hijinx that are basically just swapping tokens around with no other meaningful economic activity. Just look at chain analysis breakdowns on the latest crypto heist and watch them tumble it through stablecoins at least once (often many more). I guess that's "value" but I certainly wouldn't be touting it.

The crypto narrative of helping the unbanked is essentially PR damage control spin to try to counter all of the obvious evils that crypto is directly involved in and often responsible for. This volume (if even accurate) has nothing to do with helping regular people, the oppressed, the unbanked, whatever.

visa very clearly much more users who transact much lower amounts than stablecoins, I never claimed otherwise.

The fact remains that substantial amounts of people are using crypto rails to move very economically significant sums of money.

The fact that something can be used by bad people does not make the thing itself bad. Very similar arguments are often levelled at tools like Tor or Signal, but very few of the hacker news crowd see those viewpoints as valid.

Uncensorable and private digital cash is important in the same way that uncensorable and private digital communications are.

While Visa is often mentioned in discussions about cryptocurrencies, it's important to understand that it's not a direct counterpart. Visa is not a currency. Visa serves as a payment network, akin to Paypal. These platforms can, and in some instances such as Paypal, do support transactions in cryptocurrencies alongside fiat currencies.

In the realm of fiat currency, the closest analogue to owning a Bitcoin or Ethereum account might be holding physical cash or digitally, maintaining an account at a Federal Reserve Bank. However, the latter is rare and nearly impossible to establish, making it accessible only to exceptionally large banking institutions. A more common comparison might be that having a regular bank account is similar to having a custodial cryptocurrency account (e.g. on an exchange, PayPal, RobinHood, etc.), as it represents a method of holding without possessing the currency directly.

Regarding the 25 million figure, it's difficult to know with certainty but it is very likely that the figure understates the amount of users, as custodial accounts tend to be more common and they do not result in new on-chain addresses. Also, I'm not sure where the figure comes from because for Bitcoin alone, there are over 40 million addresses with at least 1$[0].

> has nothing to do with helping regular people, the oppressed, the unbanked, whatever.

As someone who was unbanked for a long time, and having talked to many people in that situation (most recently a couple of Russian immigrants), you are talking out of your ass here.

[0] https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses....

> As someone who was unbanked for a long time, and having talked to many people in that situation (most recently a couple of Russian immigrants), you are talking out of your ass here.

I think you missed my overall point. What I'm saying is that a transaction settlement value nearly equal to Visa is not primarily made up of these kinds of use cases. Obviously it's impossible to get real data on it but as a portion of transaction volume and value this valid (to me) use case almost certainly makes up infinitesimally small fractions of a percent of these transactions and value.

I have several friends that have fled civil wars and extremely unfavorable conditions. The (unfortunately) classic story of fleeing a country for your safety, leaving everything behind, and having to economically start over from zero in the US. In one example, I have a friend who's family was very wealthy in a country experiencing a brutal civil war in the 1980s. When their parents got to the US they were forced to take minimum wage jobs and the family lived in what was essentially poverty. They're alive but I cannot imagine what that must have been like. They talk about how jarring and terrible it was to this day and it was clearly one of the more traumatic aspects of the experience.

Do we all wish cryptocurrencies were available to them 40 years ago? I know I do. However, this runs into at least two gigantic problems in practice.

Let's say I flee from Ukraine today and get to the US with $100k of crypto currencies after I was (somehow) able to liquidate some portion of my wealth and get it on chain. Now I'm in the US. How, exactly, am I going to get it into the financial system? Once I get my documents, etc, in order I would imagine showing up to an off-ramp (like Coinbase) as a recent immigrant/refugee/asylum seeker and trying to end up with even $10k in a US bank account is going to be challenging to say the least. Again assuming I could somehow get this value on chain in the first place...

Granted this isn't an inherent fault of cryptocurrencies but it is how the real world works today in terms of the absolutely necessary on-ramps and off-ramps to the larger financial system where funds can actually be utilized. There's only so much you're going to be able to get out of a shady gas station bitcoin ATM with 15% fees. Is even $1 better than $0? Yes. Is a bank, the IRS, etc going to take issue with more significant amounts? Absolutely. Is that fair? Unfortunately, kind of. Ideally there would be some kind of program to validate this use case and source of funds similar to the process used for people to claim asylum. However, talk to anyone who has gone through that... Just being able to get into and stay in the country is a long and arduous process when you're not also bringing funds in some cryptocurrency long associated with criminality, fraud, etc.

What should/would be the process for validating the source of these funds to ensure I'm not actually some part of that oppressive government, a warlord, "terrorist", etc? It's a valid use case in theory but given the lack of ability to use cryptocurrencies directly for nearly all daily needs I'm very skeptical of the real utility.

Back to my concluding point: it's touted a lot by cryptocurrency proponents but mentioning it at the same time as pointing to a source talking about settling 11 trillion dollars of transactions is bizarre to say the least. The people pointing to this use case are, as you say, "talking out of their ass" and repeating a talking point used by cryptocurrency proponents as reference to one valid use case that is sympathetic to the rest of the population who otherwise generally has a very negative view of cryptocurrencies.

> some from people who operate outside of the law... also from people who lack access to good banking and payments infrastructure

What do you suppose that ratio to be in terms of e.g. transaction volume?

Personally I think it's >90 : <10 (scams : sympathetic). Others seem to think the balance is very different, or that it _could_ be different some day and that alone is a reason to "leave it alone".

I personally don’t have an opinion on the ratio, but there are many reports estimating that the illicit to legal ratio is much lower than you suspect.

Either way I actually don’t care that much, I think access to the financial system is a human right, and not one that governments or US corporates should be able to arbitrarily remove. Crypto is the only thing we have that is remotely close to preserving the rights that we have with cash in the digital realm, and that makes it OK in my book.

> preserving the rights that we have with cash in the digital realm

I think it goes quite a bit beyond that, or rather, the digital and physical realm are not mere 1:1 mirror images of each other.

For example in the physical realm it is really difficult to move millions of dollars of cash from one place to another particularly across prominent geographic or national boundaries (oceans, mountains, countries); the difficulty scales with the amount. Do people have this "right"? Sure, I guess, but in practice and as history has shown us, they've never been able to exercise it.

It's more or less trivial to move huge sums with crypto.

Certainly they are not 1-1 the same. Cash has better privacy properties, crypto lets you move large sums more easily.

In general, when it comes to a monetary technology, I view being able to quickly and easily make transfers as a feature not a bug.

What reports?

here’s one: https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2023-crypto-crime-report-in...

So far, crypto has gone through multiple market cycles lasting about four years each. At the peak people get euphoric and think it will solve all the world's problems, then in the trough people think it's all on its way out - that it will slowly fade out of public consciousness until it's forgotten. I believe the reality is somewhere in between.

But one thing is for sure: during the trough of every cycle, there's always someone posting that they wonder if crypto is dead and never coming back.

It's conjectured that this is due to Bitcoin's subsidy halving schedule, which is every 210000 blocks or ~4 years. The reasoning is that the supply shock trends prices upwards and the rest of the market tracks Bitcoin due to many trading pairs between it and other cryptos. But the shock gets weaker over time and hopefully the nonsense will as well.

It is interesting, because while the shock does get weaker in relative terms it's getting stronger in absolute terms. i.e. a billion dollar shock to a billion dollar asset is relatively bigger than a 100 billion dollar shock to a 500 billion dollar asset (bitcoin's current "market cap"), but the latter requires 100x the size of wealth flow.

The next supply shock will also be interesting in its own right, specifically because it will plunge bitcoin's inflation rate to below that of gold, from 1.7% now to 0.84% in 7 months. If nothing else, that will re-highlight bitcoin's digital gold narrative and potentially pull in more wealth flow that otherwise might have flowed into store of value assets like gold.

Bitcoin at current price and inflation rate requires $9 billion per year net inflows to absorb newly mined coins. In 7 months after the halving, it will only require $4.5 billion per year to maintain it's current price of $27,000. So, either it's net inflow will suddenly cut in half and the price will stay the same, or the current net inflow of $9 billion will force the price up until it reaches equilibrium, which usually triggers a market frenzy as outsiders see the gains and pile in.

For some context with gold, there theoretically exists about $200 billion of wealth flowing into it each year just to absorb newly mined gold and keep the price stable.

This is great analysis. The only caveat I would add is that while bitcoin is commonly priced in $ (fiat USD) it is much more commonly bought and sold in USDT. In fact, if a bunch of actors decided to sell bitcoin there might be plenty of USDT for that but not US$.

Some of that is due to the fact that exchanges don't due proper KYC and have trouble maintaining US banking arrangements. Some of it may be that the market is propped up by less fiat then it would need to be liquid in fiat.

I am not saying that as a problem-- maybe-- I don't know. I am just saying that as if you say bitcoin currently requires $9b usd a year to maintain its price that is not actually true.

Can miners generating new coins pay their electricity bills in USDT?

Well, there's always the possibility that this time it will be the last. Maybe the last peak is when it reaches global awareness and there's no new people to bring into the system. And I suspect it already reached that in the last cycle with Superbowl ads and Filipinos working in Axle Infinity.

Although, I feel cryptocurrency is already too big to ever end completely.

The new people in the next cycle are the freshly graduated high schoolers and new grads who weren't following the news previously and have their joining bonuses and RSUs waiting in the bank.

Can they pump Crypto as high as a good proportion of the "western" population widdling their thumbs for 6 months or more during COVID?

I say western because they were the people with the disposable income and living under governments that could support furlough/stimulus payments.

It needs energy to be expended continuously in mining it, if it uses PoW. So it might end one day.

> So it might end one day.

Only if the mining stops abruptly. Otherwise, the automatic difficulty adjustment allows it to keep working even with a reduced energy expenditure. In the extreme, a single computer running in a museum could be enough to keep the blockchain working forever.

A single computer in a museum would be vulnerable to 51% attacks. It would also be too illiquid to recoup costs.

But the 51% attack would cost more than the value of the Bitcoin you could get by doing it, which is presumably ~0 since the only node is a museum computer.

The difficulty is adjusted automatically depending on how many miners there are, so it can go down.

That might be one of those things that works well in the short term but may also have severe tail risks.

I heard a similar story about an algorithmic stablecoin called Luna (I think). The analogue of difficulty adjustments there worked fine until one day it didn't.

They can ultimately change the code if needed. Luna also tried that IIRC.

Indeed, one can "change the code" to do anything... including things like increasing the bitcoin supply arbitrarily. Bitcoin's scarcity is a social construct that will be changed when the people who control the nodes want to change it.

Luna was a very different situation, it was nothing to do with difficulty adjustments.

It would be a shame if this keeps happening, like: (2013) Bitcoin and its clones failed at all their stated purposes, (2017) the ICO craze left nothing of value, (2021) the DeFi/NFT bubble also left nothing but rubble. This stuff is zero sum, shuffling money without creating new things of enduring value.

At the moment, you can buy drugs with it online. Don't know if that will last, though.

Can you still!?

It's so incredibly traceable these days and every iteration of Silk Road gets busted, no?

Dark web markets absolutely still exist. The traceability problem is at least partially solved using mixers. I don't know everything there is to know here, like how easy it is to get back fiat.

The markets get busted (or become scams), the dealers not so much. If you’re on these markets regularly for years you’re probably communicating directly with sellers at this point.

As far as I know, criminals are using Monero these days.

Every claim in your comment is factually false.

Bitcoin did factually fail at its stated goal, as laid out in the original whitepaper. Bitcoin has not succeeded at being a peer-to-peer currency, because the "peer-to-peer" part went out the window when users stopped hosting their own nodes, and the currency part was abandoned when people realized that transaction throughput is fatally low.

Well, more like it’s no longer p2p after the 2017 hard fork and people are being pushed to use Lightning which centralizes over time through hub and spoke model, and many people prefer to use custodial wallets.

Crypto has always had extreme bull and bear markets. During bear markets the speculators leave, crypto's detractors once again proclaim its demise, and its believers anxiously wait for the next bull market.

All the grifters and dilettantes moved on to AI :)

My thinking has always been that Bitcoin can solve the issue of continued printing of fiat money. Bitcoin and other crypto clearly introduces other problems but this fundamental weakness of fiat currency is still there and unsolved. Will bitcoin/crypto really go away if this issue with fiat currency is still unresolved?

Bitcoin has a critical issue looming with the security budget, as each halvening means less revenue for miners, and miners don’t get enough transaction fees to incentivize running ASIC mining farms.

You can print new crypto by forking an existing chain, because if it suddenly gets a ton of new users, none of them have any reason to respect what the slow database says the current ones belong to.

Meanwhile, printing fiat money isn't a problem and is in fact the reason the system works. Crypto users and Austrians are deluded about the purpose of money, which is to facilitate transactions and not to keep score.

Check out Ampleforth, a perfect elastic supply, if Bitcoin had oracles in 2008, then the protocol would've behaved as AMPL

The genie is out of the box. How would 2008 have played out if Bitcoin existed back then?

Grifters moved on to AI, leaving only the actually viable parts of crypto around. So yeah cryptos are 100% dead.

Just getting started with cryptocurrency I would say. Bitcoin Spot ETFs decisions being delayed by SEC, Ether Futures ETFs were just approved by SEC. Crypto will likely be part of our everyday lives eventually, we just won’t know it.