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Comment by AgentME | Hacker News Reader

>Focus your time and energy on BTC, ETH and an anonymous coin like XMR. Any other offering should be met with skepticism.

To elaborate/explain on this point for those less familiar: those three cryptocurrencies actually are based on real technical innovation, and have developer communities producing more technical innovation. There are many other cryptocurrencies that have zero technical innovation (or completely nonsense innovation) and are merely clones of previous cryptocurrencies with some identifiers tweaked, made purely so investors can pump and dump.

The article in part 5 ("The decline of Maximalism") seems to be criticizing the idea that people would prefer some cryptocurrencies to others, which is completely ridiculous. There are real differences / issues with many.

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Technical innovation is not the only type of innovation happening in the crypto space. There are tokens being developed whose innovations are financial, social, political, and economic. Don't assume technical innovation is the end all be all, Ethereum's technical innovation allows for the other types of innovation to occur, for example.

To strengthen my argument, you wouldn't expect every startup on the Internet to develop their own Apache server, HTTP protocol, and all the other technical innovations that allow for their business to exist, would you?

I don't exactly disagree; I think there are some ICOs that are promising. (And I'm happy that many are being built on top of a pre-existing blockchain like Ethereum's rather than pretending they're secure without a large group of miners securing their blockchain.)

Maybe I should drop the word "technical": There are many projects out there with no real innovation whatsoever that were created only to facilitate pump-and-dumps rather than to enable some kind of innovation.

I think the word you are looking for is differentiation.

The innovations are technical yet in the sense of theoretical mostly. Save the backlash, I'm just voicing the most critical opinion.

> Technical innovation is not the only type of innovation happening in the crypto space.

It's the only kind that matters; all other innovation should be built on top of those using the technically innovative base as a building block. Launching "new" coins that are merely clones are simply going to lead to failure. Bitcoin is not like Apache, you can't just grab its code and use it and think you've got what bitcoin has. Bitcoin is not its code, Bitcoin is its network, Bitcoin is like Facebook, network effects dominate, and you must use actual Bitcoin, not just launch a Bitcoin clone, to benefit from it.

> To strengthen my argument, you wouldn't expect every startup on the Internet to develop their own Apache server, HTTP protocol, and all the other technical innovations that allow for their business to exist, would you?

I don't want them making their own Apache server in the exact same way I don't want them making their own coin. They should use an existing standardized setup. A smart contract can be useful. A "coin in support of X charitable effort, come mine today" is pretty much nonsense.

What functional technical innovation is there in ETH that is currently available for use? Some real, usable product that people actively utilize today that's unique and has tangible value?

All ICOs and tokens are on Ethereum. While Bitcoin has had a script capability for quite a bit, it didn't get much traction.

The most advanced platform for Ponzi schemes, then?

There are many ICOs and tokens on other platforms, including Bitcoin. E.g. [see here](https://coinmarketcap.com/tokens/). #3 and #4 are on Omni, which is Bitcoin-based.

Ethereum is actually technically inferior as a platform for tokens, but it has a fantastic community which is very much into tokens, so that's why it is much bigger than what you see on other platforms (BitShares, Nxt, Omni, Counterparty, WAVES...)

Ethereum-based tokens have grown to 85% of the total token market cap. Most if not all of the applications built around Ethereum's ERC20 standard, like Etherdelta and 0x, are possible because the EVM enables Turing Completeness. That makes Ethereum far superior to the other platforms mentioned as a token platform.

Ethereum itself is just a building block. It only appeared few years ago, and applications using it are being built right now.

You can see applications built on it -- decentralized exchanges, prediction markets, derivates/derivative markets, gambling sites and so on.

It's kinda ridiculous to demand "actively utilize today", although some apps are in active use, but they are pretty niche.

At this point we talk about what _can_ be built, not what _was_ built.

As for 'tangible value', tangibility is very subjective. There are still people who claim that Bitcoin has no tangible value, but I bet if you were living in a country with an unstable banking system, ridiculous capital controls and high crime rate, you'd see Bitcoin's value

Yes the number of coins that produce nothing is large, but the top coins account for like 90% of the market cap. The pump and dump game is overstated

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