… the founding ideas are promising, and something I dream of.
Before I start, just a little bit of background on me so you can understand how biased I am (😅): I’m a 16 years old programmer and I won a few crypto hackathon/funding rounds and I made a lot of friends in the field. It allowed me to get quite a bit of ETH/XMR along the way!
I see cryptocurrencies getting a lot of hate, rightly so for the number of scams, shitcoins, NFTs bullshit, “governance”, DAOs and all those often useless & snob terms.
However the founding ideas of decentralisation and freedom with your money are very appealing to me. Smart contracts are really interesting for creating your own banking operation and tokens can represent anything! It’s a world of possibilities to play with, and you get to build something useful for people!
I’d just like to add a bit of nuance tho: I see a lot of apps being built and what’s really making me laugh is the lack of open-source, decentralisation and auditing on privacy. Granted, there is a lot of fake promises, but it’s like everything, you have to find the talented people to follow.
I find it fascinating to build unstoppable, decentralised, user-first apps. I just hope that web3 stays true to its founding principles.
Hope it was interesting, tell me what you think!
EDIT: title+typos+the game is not comfortably played in Act 2
Main thing: you won’t solve societal problems with technology. All of the problems we have today can be solved using what we have but we don’t want a better world.
Exactly. We have all the tools we need to solve society’s problems, we’ve had them for thousands of years. The issue is that it would make it harder for people in power to continue to accumulate power and money, so it won’t happen.
Crypto cannot solve this, it’s actually making the problem worse since it allows very wealthy people to launder dirty money for (almost) free.
Crypto also has an absolutely horrendous reputation with the general population who only hear about the scams, so using it in/with your products severely restricts who will buy your products.
… the founding ideas are promising, and something I dream of.
Hard disagree. The founding idea of cryptocurrency is to trick people out of their real currency. It’s an elaborate fake-money scheme. Good riddance.
What always got me was that in these bitcoin bros were always like: yeah, no more big banks, i want to use my bitcoins like money.
While at the same time go: haha some idiot bought a pizza with bitcoin which would now be worth 40k dollars now, what a dork.
And everyone goes, you need to hold, i’m gonna hold are you all gonna hold? We’re all holding right? Btw look at this cool billionaire selling his bitcoin at the right time, i wish i was him.
How did they never seen that they are all just people waiting to fuck over some other people. Bot a pyramid scheme thoIt just isn’t though. The major currency, bitcoin, was made avalible in 2008, there weren’t any scams going on back then. It was meant to be as simple as a decentralised currency that the people had full control over. I think that’s a great thing. It wasn’t until scammers and grifters saw a new market that could be exploited because it required a good understanding of how it works to be used properly. Scammers dumbed it down and huge centralised exchanges came in opening the door to scams. However it’s definitely not a currency yet, I’ll agree, it’s more of an asset. It’s such a shame that a technology that could’ve helped put people in full control of their money has been diluted into such a shit show. Whenever I hear about a new project touting “crypto based” or Blockchain i wince like I’m sure you do, because NOW it’s become a scam, it wasn’t originally.
It took all of 6 years for banks and scams to be reinvented – mt gox was in 2014
The concept of decentralized finance infrastructure without outside regulation and governance is interesting in a vacuume.
In practical reality, it’s by definition, a return to the century+ old unregulated financial wild west. Scams and stupidity were rampant. We had to create all the regulations and restrictions we’re used to now, for people to be able to use the system instead of their mattresses to keep their money.
Is using the mattress such a bad thing? Nobody is going to care as much about your money as you will. If you fuck up and lose everything you are devistated. If the CEO of Wells Fargo looses your money they have no need to care because the government will force their slaves to make it up to you, or not. At the end of the day they can choose not to help you and you can do nothing about it.
Edits: spelling
Even if the CEO of Wells Fargo loses your money, you will still get at least $250,000 of it back (assuming you had deposited that much) via the FDIC.
The FDIC will honor their obligations because to do otherwise would be to risk a massive bank run, of the sort that started the Great Depression. This wouldn’t just screw you over, it would screw over the ultra-wealthy too, and we can’t have that.
At the end of the day, someone can just not take your mattress money and you might be out of luck. Your mattress can burn down and all that money is gone, which is far more likely than Wells Fargo taking your money and then the FDIC not giving you anything.
I was an early adopter of bc and more than ten years later I am still waiting for it to be useful.
Back then the dream was that you would be paid in it and could pay your rent and food with it. But honestly it was just a fun experiment and not very serious.
Also I think a weakness is that you can’t print more when it is needed to prop up the economy, so USD etc will still be required to run things smoothly. Printing is just a way of distributing a little bit of value from everyone to a specific goal and sometimes this is essential.
I’m not saying that there isn’t a better system, but just that the current one needs this flexibility.
Yeah I never got the proof of authority thing, pretty ironic
As a programmer, the biggest problem I have with crypto is that it adds an (I believe) unnecessary pressure on either compute (for proof of work) or storage (for proof of stake) prices for everyone else in the world, for what is seemingly not a huge gain.
Proof of work in particular is awful, because one of the biggest problems that we actually have in the real world is global warming and adding a financial incentive to using more power is exactly the wrong direction we need to be going in. I realize that a lot of crypto is moving away from proof of work, but it’s still there.
Proof of stake has basically zero impact on storage prices. The demand of every validator requiring a 1tb harddrive is substantially less than every miner requiring SEVERAL nvidia graphics cards
But it’s not “every validator has one HDD”. It’s “you can establish an out-sized representation of the swarm by spawning more processes with more storage”.
The pressure doesn’t come from one person mining at home, it comes from organized groups trying to intentionally game the system.
I think the central problem with crypto is that it is a hammer in search of a nail. The founding ideas are great in the realm of ideas, but in the real world it doesn’t really pan out. A currency is only as valuable as the goods you can buy with it. For our most common currency, the USD, the value of an individual dollar is based on its near universal acceptance and its ease of use. The price of the dollar may fluctuate because of speculation (stock traders betting on what the dollar will be worth in the future), but without speculation, the dollar would still be valuable because you can use it to buy almost anything in the world that is for sale.
What is the use case for crypto? Where does using bitcoin or ethereum make more sense than just using USD or Euros? Crypto is secured via the blockchain, but it is not more secure than standard currencies. Quite the contrary - if i make a credit card transaction and the vendor doesn’t send me my goods, I can call my credit card company and dispute the transaction. If I do the same with crypto, I am left high and dry. There are methods like escrow to get around this, but those require the intervention of a third party. At that point, why not just use your credit card?
The only real world advantage that crypto seems to have over other currencies is that it is both difficult to trace and it is digital. To my knowledge, the only time one might need both these qualities is if you are making an illegal online transaction. If the transaction is not illegal, then using a credit card is always better. If the transaction does not need to be online, then using cash is always easier.
Illegal online transactions are a relatively rare use case, and so most people that are buying or selling crypto are doing it to speculate. They don’t believe in crypto as an idea - they dream of buying low and selling high, or mining the coin and selling it for more than the cost of the power to mine it. Because most people are only buying into crypto to sell it later (rather than exchange it for goods), coins have nothing to stabilize their value. It’s pump-and-dump schemes all the way down.
The only real world advantage that crypto seems to have over other currencies is that it is both difficult to trace and it is digital.
most crypto currencies (excluding Monero) are easier to trace than fiat money since every transaction is public to anyone as long as you know the public key (address)
relying on “Mixer” services require are third party in hope they don’t actually sell you out and most crypto exchanges have kyc implemented by lawgreat point, which actually helps further my point. Regulations passed over the past 10 years to clamp down on crypto have minimized its effectiveness as a less-traceable currency, which further reduces the cases where cryptocurrencies are better or easier to use than fiat currencies.
For a start, bitcoin is revolutionary. It solves all the problems with the banking system.
For example, people’s card details get stolen all the time. Bitcoin had solved this by using a new public key for each transaction.
When something is purchased using a credit/debit card, you are effectively using the same public key for every transaction. So what is happening is replay attacks. This type of scam is inevitable because the banking system is insecure by nature. It’s built on a foundation of insecurity.
Bitcoin fixes all that. Bitcoin or similar is necessary for money-based economies to continue to work in the future.
Bitcoin and crypto are more than this. This is just one of the important innovations bitcoin makes.
Sorry but your examples of the problems are pretty minor and solvable by other means (you can’t do much with my credit card details because they require strong authentication which uses one-time passwords). Also, you conveniently leave out all the problems with cryptocurrency. It’s not like you’re protected in any way. We also do not have any adopted implementation of cryptocurrency that’s not slow and super wasteful of resources. So far they’ve also had the ponzi-scheme problem… first adopters can become very rich but late-comers get crumbs or lose everything.
