The cryptocurrency bubble is strangling innovation?
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Both these goals seem to have failed in practice, the latter spectacularly (although other cryptocurrencies have done better in this regard).
To truly be trustless, you can't generate keys/addresses on some website like bitaddress or use some other online wallet, as you're clearly trusting bitaddress to not be copying your key (and/or have the ability to fully and carefully audit their code... few people have this capability and even fewer have the patience to do so). You have to do something like this: generate them offline using a computer which can never communicate with the Internet after you use it. And you need to do it at least twice with two completely different implementations to ensure your public and private key truly match.
In practicality, I have to send a picture of my ID to some third party exchange in order to use it. REALLY? Why don't I just use PayPal?
In practicality, Bitcoin is only /ritually/ trustless and decentralized. And it's worthless for microtransactions. (Etherium is better, but not perfect.)
I really do think the whole industry has become too enamored with the cloud and with centralization, but these steps toward decentralization seem self-defeating as they rely on (centralized!) apps from a centralized appstore in practice. Might as well trust PayPal or Apple or whoever. Or even just a regular bank. Or even better, a credit union that you, as an account holder, have voting power over.
If I'm using Windows, I trust Microsoft. If I'm using Ubuntu, I trust Canonical. If I use Android or Chrome, I trust Google. If I use iOS, I trust Apple. On some level, I also trust Intel and/or AMD and/or NVidia and my chipset provider, too. Trustlessness only exists in theory (and even then, only with certain assumptions--like a distributed mining pool or stake that hasn't become centralized), and you can make a good case that in practicality cryptocurrencies actually INCREASE your trust attack surface area.
It all starts looking like a lot of overhead for transactions.
That will stop being the case once people stop treating all the coins as investment speculations. That won't occur until the bubble pops. After that, with the typical trauma that goes with it due to financial losses, it will become almost impossible to convince people to plow large amounts of money into inflating a given coin (as in the case of so many of the lesser crypto-coins that are seeing musical chair speculation booms).
The speculation on a stray coin to moonshot next, is no different than the speculation on which beanie baby will soar next circa 1998/99. Once the bubble gave way, you could no longer convince anyone that they all should be worth large sums, or that the musical chairs of inflating one beanie baby to the next should continue. It's classic group hysteria and it tends to reverse violently.
Once that occurs, you'll find the exact opposite problem more common: nobody will want to bother wasting any money on nearly any coins, in any regard (whether for transactions or sheer speculation). Group think will shift to nearly all coins as being worthless, as they actually are.
The other aspect I think the people calling bubbles are underestimating is the liquidity of information and assets through this network. Speculators will invest primarily in the forefront of cryptocurrencies technology - ICOs, low and middle-tier exchanges - looking for the next 100x. As coins grow the capital from established coins will spread and risk, hopefully, will also spread. Information on every coin is readily available and people are trading and chatting about these things all day every dat, so rumors and news should diffuse and keep prices in line. The technology will improve over time, hopefully to a point where the valuation is justified.
I'm not saying that will happen, but in my mind there is a plausible path, and that's enough for me to keep some money in.
Bitcoin rose out of the previous financial collapse by appealing to people who have lost trust in institutions. The problem with building a trustless answer to that problem is that (assertions ahead) life isn't compatible with an absence of trust.
Trying to build a trustless financial system is a quixotic undertaking at best. It really smacks of a utopian dream where fundamental aspects of human nature are blithely ignored.
Of course, as you point out, no one is really trying to do it. Most people will have to trust Coinbase or whichever exchange they choose.
It only requires us to trust the legal system
On the other hand, 2008 was partly enabled by entities trusting each other. They trusted AAA ratings, AIG, Goldman Sachs, and third party holders of mortgage records. In various ways, all these systems failed the people who trusted them.
There are multiple providers. If one provider goes bust you can still move to the next.
There are a few minor differences.
The blockchain retains data accross providers as long as there is at least a single node. Traditional systems like email require you to migrate your data manually from the old provider to the new one. PoW is spam resistant because it costs money to send spam.
That's only if you want to exchange fiat<->BTC. If you just want to pay people who accept BTC with BTC, you don't need to use any exchanges.
> In practicality
If the point the author is trying to make is that Amazon and Google were made possible by the dotcom boom, and that the collapse of the dotcom bubble was part of the price we as a society had to pay to have the services provided these companies, that's a really really bad argument.
Amazon was founded in 1995 and IPO'ed in 1997, before the IPO market got crazy. Google was founded in 1997 and IPO'ed in 2004 when tech stocks were still a punchline. Neither of these companies is an example of any kind of silver lining for your Uncle Bob losing thousand of bucks after buying into a rapidly appreciating security (or currency) whose underlying value he does not understand whatsoever.
The point though, is that both Google and Amazon were able to get themselves off of the ground without taking advantage of all the stupid money that flooded the Valley in the 1998-2000 time period, quite to the contrary of the argument I quoted in the parent comment.
Well, the article actually refers to that argument as a "desperate rationalization," although rather than delving into refuting the analogy he focuses on his primary thesis which is that right now, the speculative bubble is preventing any real determination of whether the blockchain technology has (or does not have) any practical uses.
Also, to be fair, the TC Article's author is fairly optimistic about the possibilities in crypto/decentralized apps. At least during the dotcom boom, the deluge of foolish money was vaguely aimed at truly revolutionary technology that had been proven useful for over a decade, and had recently produced legitimate companies with traditional, viable, revenue-generating business models.
It didn't hurt to have a large pool of ambitious and underutilized technical folks around to choose from.
"Lightning Network" will really help the PoW coins too.
Sure, I could create my own coin to use as an in-app currency for my project, but why? A coin is only worth what you can buy with it, and nobody is going to sell anything worthwhile with some random, in-app coin.
Even Bitcoin was just abandoned by Microsoft, because it's so overpriced you'd have to be insane to trade anything for it other than high-risk investment cash.
Until this bonkers hype cycle gets to the peak of productivity, the blockchain has no real world purpose other than as a shared database.
Microsoft didn't abandon Bitcoin because it was overpriced, they abandoned it because it was volatile.
One could argue that a blockchain's only real world purpose is as a shared database, just as http's only real world purpose is the transfer of data between computers.
Volatile and also large fees.
Here is Steam describing why it was a pain of using it: http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/...
It was "volatile" when they adopted it. It's now volatile and overpriced. If MS thought that Bitcoin was a good investment, volatile or not, they would have stuck with it. "Volatile" is acting as an excuse for their real sentiment, that it's time to short Bitcoin.
The volatility is what makes it untenable as payment, as you can't sell it fast enough to ensure that you get the same exchange rate you gave to the customer.
Absolutely false. Speculation has driven the value of bitcoin so high that the average transaction fee, at the time of writing this, is about $31. Buying a $59.99 game for Xbox One will cost you $90 in Bitcoin. That is an individual hash, that must be consolidated into a larger wallet for MS to sell off. Consolidating that hash will cost a transaction fee, meaning that, on a $60 game, MS will lose over 50% of the gross profit in a transaction fee.
That alone makes it not worth it. The only thing that would allow them to retain a higher percentage of the transaction would be for the Bitcoin bubble to burst, making that whole $60 worthless.
Bitcoin could be wholly volatile within it's 2016 prices and MS would be just fine. It is directly because of it's exploded, overpriced value that it's untenable as an actual currency.
So far it seems like the only thing anyone actually makes based on this shared database are new mini-currencies.
Bitcoin/cryptocurrency is stuff for rich and tech-savvy people.
- Folks with stressful and demanding jobs probably won't bother with full-time security measures to protect their wallets.
- The same group won't have time to watch every piece of crypto news about which service or product is possibly bad/hacked (see electrum wallets).
- Extremely high volatility means you need to be prepared to essentially lose the dollar value of your bitcoins.
Rich people can hire someone to do these things. They can also likely afford to lose whatever balance they tie up in bitcoin without affecting their standard of living.
Rich people can also manipulate the price, and mainstream and retail investors are never going to know about that (see: people who bought in at $19k during that hype cycle).
Rich people can afford astroturfing services to spread memes and good morale to pump the price. Rich people likely have significant control over hype cycles and may even be pumping other cryptocurrencies to start diversifying.
Tech-savvy people may have less-stressful jobs or jobs where they can browse the internet to keep up with cryptocurrency news. But at least they can manage the security considerations likely from previous knowledge.
Ultimately, crypto will never really be a product for poor/middle-class people. It's just a terrible idea. You're relying on a system that has virtually no accountability other than businesses dying (and how hard is it really to spin up a new crypto service if you're a rich person?)
That's super interesting. We assumed that the decentralization of content brought on by the Internet and social media would put a stop to stuff like that, but instead, due to anonymity, simply painted a veneer of populism over the same old trick. It worked for the election, so why not apply it to manipulate speculative investments?
ICO is a way to get around the reporting requirements of an IPO and the minimum-net-worth requirements for private investments by regular folk (ostensibly to protect them from exactly this kind of asymmetric information, speculative manipulation that occurred in the roaring 20s...).
Bitcoin has the advantage that it lacks any significant regulatory oversight or penalties while being useful across borders, which regulatory agencies are usually constrained by.
Doesn't mean you should uncritically buy into conspiracy theories without evidence, just that considering the possibility of manipulation and shenanigans is entirely reasonable.
The only significant benefit that cryptos offer is a scheme that allows you to make payments without handing over your credit card number in case you're not sure some sketchy site is legit. So really, the big appeal of crypto was being the new Paypal. Personally, I would like an open source or federated replacement for Paypal that makes it easy to pay everywhere online without entering a CC, but I would rather not try and create and buy into a new currency in the process of doing so.
Maybe something like GNU Taler can fix the credit card problem, but I'm not holding my breath on bitcoin.
We can see this when network usage drops, or the gas limit increases. Fees drop to low levels in dollar terms, even if the ETH price stays up.
There is one way that the ETH price sets a minimum on gas costs: miners race each other to make blocks, processing transactions causes delay. The more valuable the block reward, the higher the expected cost of that delay, and miners demand compensation for that. But this doesn't seem to be a large effect since gas prices are sometimes quite low. (Full proof of stake would eliminate this race dynamic.)
Over the past year I've seen a serious decline in early stage angel investment. I've talked to a lot of people who have said similar things. What I've heard and in some cases observed is that it's all going to crypto. All the people who would be making speculative angel investments are now buying into cryptocurrency coins and ICOs in the hopes of riding the bubble.
This is really awful for two reasons:
(1) Few if any of these ICO systems have any utility at all, while many early stage startups end up creating things of actual value. It represents a shift in investment from value creation to pure speculation.
(2) When -- not if, but when -- this bubble pops, a lot of that wealth that could have been used to fund angel investment will be vaporized. Yes most startups fail but at least angel funding tends to support attempts at value creation. In this case we're losing tons of money to support nothing but the burning of coal to heat the atmosphere.
Everything else this article says is spot on-- any value that could be present in cryptocurrency is being harmed by its relentless appreciation. Hyper-deflation is not a desirable characteristic in a currency.
I lived through the dot.com bubble and that one was much less vapid. Even though many startups were over-funded and speculation ran the stock market into crazy land, a lot of actual value did get created. In this case I see almost none.
This whole thing feel like a reductio ad absurdium of financial capitalism, which ironically is the system Bitcoin was created to replace.
The kind of engineers who'd be naturally drawn to smaller startups and didn't want to work for Google or Facebook, are now being attracted to the crypto space in ever greater numbers. For that reason, it will become even harder to start a non-crypto startup in the near future.
I think this will become more and more obvious throught 2018 and 2019.
Does the crypto world have anything to offer the real world?
Personally I've only seen one common use case: currency and wire transfer. As the OA correctly points out this use case is being harmed by currency hyper-deflation and fee inflation. Even the black market use case is faltering for these reasons.
Few ICO projects are even usable. Most don't even exist. Of those that are usable I can off the top of my head think of only one that seems to have any utility that doesn't recurse into crypto: Siacoin. Siacoin apparently works but it's not a compelling alternative to Amazon S3 or Backblaze, so its utility is minimal at best.
Awful? Yes, the bubble will probably pop at some point.. however, from a risk reward PoV, over the last few years it seemed more likely to be able to 10x your money in crypto than it was to make a successful angel investment. Getting into the good deals is hard without a proper network in place and most angel investments fail. I think it's normal people reallocate to the more interesting opportunity available at a certain point in time. No point in throwing money at bad ideas if you can't get into the interesting deals.
Once most of the crypto gains have been made, this will shift again. If the fed sets up another QE programme, more money will flow into the stock market, etc.
The dotcom bubble only lasted 2.5-3 years. Most of the housing bubble's value inflation happened in 3-4 years.
The problem isn't cryptocurrency or fads. Its stupid investors spending money on stupid things. I mean, its fine, its their money and all. But obviously, if investors spent the money on more useful things, it'd be better innovation for everyone (and those investors would surely get better returns).
At the moment, we're in an "everything bubble" and people just don't know what to put their money into. Bonds have low yields, the stock market has a dangerously high P/E ratio, and everything in venture capitalism has the word blockchain in it (even Hooters and Long Island Ice Tea). I'm sure there are some smart investors out there who have figured out what is truly useful, but like the old rule says: 90% of everything is crap. And that includes investments...
http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/21/investing/long-island-iced-t...
Erm, yes they are. And they're doing it in roughly the stupided manner possible. There's a ton of people who literally hear the word "blockchain" and then just throw money at it.
That's why these no-name penny stocks go up 200%+ when they change their Facebook page to include the words "blockchain", even if it makes no freaking sense.
Even though they had the dns hijacking a while ago, you can still access the market via direct calls to the contract. When it's time to liquidate a large alt holding back into ETH, ED is the only place I trust because I don't have to trust anyone.
When etherdelta deploys - they call a script of mine that calculates the md5 of their files in github and creates automatically a new version in Chrome Web Store.
I use my plugin whenever I visit etherdelta so I can be sure that their deployed version matches the one on github.com
I just updated EtherDelta Guard to version 1.1.149 that switches from md5 to sha256 which is secure.
This is why I love HN, people are really helpful and get straight to the point without any fuss.
You may want to have a look on Etherdelta API if you don't want to use directly the smart contract. https://github.com/etherdelta/etherdelta.github.io/blob/mast...
They are chasing novelty, they do not seem dedicated to their craft. I think this is a bit of a problem.
Besides the rising fees (which can be mitigated with added protocol layers like lightning) the real problem is people understanding cryptocurrencies as investment. "Crypto investors" and people hoping to get rich quick who don't understand the fundamental philosophy of Bitcoin/Crypto are strangling innovation by adding "noise" attention to whatever developers like us "signal" are making.
Personally, I hope the bubble bursts, everyone lose their money and we go back to the original community of people building stuff, who see cryptocurrency as a technology, not an "investment". If Bitcoin drops to $1, I will still write software for it and won't miss the 'craze' factor.
The problem is not fees rather usability. If today I speak to a layman about bitcoin he is confused. It doesn't help that people start talking about hardware wallets, multisigs, Segwit etc. Most of those guys find that using cryptocurrency is a pain and want to stick to real money. Yes, it doesn't stop them from speculating by putting some money in these coins.
One thing has to be noted, while there is a constant parallel drawn with dot com people forget that there was at least 7-8 years head start for a layman to understand "internet". There has been no run up here, things have just exploded.
Bitcoin has been around for 8 years so it's not like there hasn't been enough time. The difference is that the internet was easy to explain to people because it had a number of immediately useful applications: you could almost immediately send email, read the news or stream audio content (by 1995), lookup stock information and place trades, download software, buy things, chat, find a date or adult content, etc. — in most cases things people had been able to do starting at some point in the late 1970s using online services like CompuServ or bulletin boards, only easier and cheaper. Most of these were also easy to explain because they had familiar analogues: buying a book or CD online in the early 90s was immediately familiar — it's like buying from a catalog except that you don't have the delays receiving the catalog and mailing or phoning in your order.
The difference is that Bitcoin doesn't solve a problem which the average person has. To the average person it sounds like using a credit card except that most places don't take it, the fees are orders of magnitude higher, and there's no fraud protection. How many people have a legal reason to prefer it other than paying ransomware or speculating on its price?
The key feature of crypto currency (to me) has always been that it can't be easily manipulated by a government. Specifically with bitcoin, were it not so expensive and have such high fees, it could be of real use in countries with hyperinflation and black markets (Venezuela, Zimbabwe, etc). Hopefully bitcoin and the myriad of alt-coins can fill the gap.
Once it takes a foothold in a failed state, I can only imagine it spreading.
I hope that hyperinflation and/or economic collapse don't come to America/Western Europe. But i'm not so naive to think that it can't.
Other well-heeled organizations can do these things as well: corporations, hedge funds, organized crime, ...
People seem to think that currency manipulation and other financial games were invented in the 20th century with modern fiat currency. The price of gold absolutely was manipulated in the past in a variety of ways: secret hoarding, spoofing reserves, false transactions, etc. Every currency or medium of exchange has been manipulated.
In many ways central banking and fiat currency was invented to defend against many types of market manipulation by non-state or foreign state actors (as well as against undesirable emergent behaviors in markets). I once read someone talking about US vs. China trade and Chinese currency manipulation state that for the US to abolish the Fed would amount to "unilateral disarmament." We would suddenly have no coherent way to defend ourselves against other nations armed with the ability to manipulate their own currencies (and ours!).
Current estimates rate the cost of a 51% attack at approximatly 4.656.671.184$ for hardware only which is not a sum which even large countries will have easy (and certainly not unnoticed) access to.
This estimate is based on the current hash rate at 14.975.580.960 GHash/s and the fastest mining hardware available which is the AntMiner S5+ at ~2300$ with a hashrate of 7.722 GHash/s. That means you'll need about ~1.939.340 AntMiners which will consume 3436W each. At an electricty cost of 0.05ct/kwh (this is china, US is at about ~0.20ct/kwh) this gives you an additional cost of ~7.996.185$ per day not factoring in any labor/location costs and most notably no cooling costs which will be high with this kind of high performance asic.
This estimate only holds true though if you buy every bit of hardware yourself, in reality its probably more practical to simple coerce big mining pool owners to work for you, but thats another problem :)
edit: relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/538/
But that doesn't preclude a new layer on top of bitcoin, or using an alt-coin (monero) that has anonymity baked in.
I would say that USD/Euros do have the risk of deanonymization (unlikely as it may be). The government would simply need to say "all bills $20 and over will be worthless in 2 weeks, you need to exchange them for new bills at your bank where your transaction will be recorded". India just did that with not 100 Rupees and higher.
Perhaps, but I'd want that technology to exist and be well peer-reviewed before even considering recommending it in a sensitive context.
> I would say that USD/Euros do have the risk of deanonymization (unlikely as it may be). The government would simply need to say "all bills $20 and over will be worthless in 2 weeks, you need to exchange them for new bills at your bank where your transaction will be recorded". India just did that with not 100 Rupees and higher.
Note that I was talking about that in the context of a stable currency used in an unstable country, where e.g. the Venezuelan government can't force the US Mint to do anything.
However, either way that seems like a much better situation to be in because cash doesn't have a permanent history associated with every bill. Unless they setup the infrastructure to require everyone to record every transaction, all you'd need is one transaction to break the chain — take those new bills and buy dinner and who can link you to the change?
Right, instead of being easily manipulated by governments, it's manipulated by its founders right out of the gate, and anyone else that manages to get an outsized stake in the currency down the road.
"Only worthwhile (maybe) in a failed state condition when there is no other viable currency" is not exactly a ringing endorsement.
I think these benefits are tangible, but whilst the current block chain mechanism might demonstrate the utility, what we really need are the fee/transaction time problem to be resolved.
I really want someone far more intelligent than me to explain whether or not a zero-sum instantaneous transaction is formally, logically impossible (via a successor to block chain?) because that really is the killer app, imo.
> I really want someone far more intelligent than me to explain whether or not a zero-sum instantaneous transaction is formally, logically impossible (via a successor to block chain?) because that really is the killer app, imo.
The hard part is trying to do it without central authorities and pseudo-anonymity. Using PKI makes that a much easier problem.
It only took about five years, from early 1996 to 2000, for most lay persons in the US to grasp the value of the Internet and begin routinely using it at home or work.
Internet usage in the US went from ~10% of adults to over 50% of adults in that time.
The browser largely extracted away the need for a person to understand much of anything about how it worked. Today most people do not understand very much about the Internet. They know how to use it because browsers are simple and easy to use.
Most likely the lay person will never know anything substantial about how crypto coins actually work. The complexity will be extracted away by services and that'll be that.
Bitcoin has had a several year run up at this point, just as the dotcom era did starting in ~1995. Bitcoin was showing up on national news sources in the US four to five years ago when it first climbed above $100 and then again (at a far more dramatic level) as it climbed toward $1k. I was discussing it with lay persons in 2012 and 2013, they understood it then about as well as they do now, which is to say not at all (imo). My take is that they end up picturing it vaguely as some kind of digital token, while largely not understanding any of the underlying technology. I expect that to mostly continue to be the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)#Sales
"From February 6, 2011 to July 23, 2013 there were approximately 1,229,465 transactions completed on the site. The total revenue generated from these sales was 9,519,664 Bitcoins, and the total commissions collected by Silk Road from the sales amounted to 614,305 Bitcoins. These figures are equivalent to roughly $1.2 billion in revenue and $79.8 million in commissions, at current Bitcoin exchange rates..."
Granted, the number of buyers was at somewhat measly 146,946.
The "store of value" and "investment opportunity" spiel only started when transaction fees became too onerous for everyday usage.
What I heard back in 2009 was that it was a way to trade money using cryptographic hashes without a central authority. I didn't really think about it more deeply than that. I didn't bother setting up a wallet or anything like that as I didn't have any extra cash to waste on new technology. But I kept a halfhearted eye on it as an alternate way of making payments over the internet.
When I finally went and looked at the mechanisms and the algorithm I thought "wow this is a bad joke." It's inherently deflationary and will never be an accepted currency outside a narrow niche of (mostly illicit) users. It's price relative to USD will always be volatile due to its astronomically high gini coefficient, and anyone not on the high end of that inverse exponential distribution will _never_ prefer bitcoin over USD. BTC printing mining will eventually cease entirely, meaning the transactions will require transaction fees that scale up depending on the size of the network, which will further discourage adoption until ultimately the whole scheme collapses (the founders having cashed out a long time ago).
Fees are Bitcoin's problem now, and will likely be its biggest problem (along with continued volatility) until the network ceases to function entirely.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-mining_profitab...
There are two interesting points. First, is that early mining was exponentially more lucrative than later mining. Second, is that somewhere around 2014, mining profitability seriously plummeted (this can be seen more easily in logarithmic view). Before 2014, the lowest profitability rate was somewhere around $200/day for 1 THash/s. During 2014, the profitability plummeted and since then has not gone above $4/day per 1THash/s. There was a slight bump in 2017, probably due to the speculative bubble, but profitability still did not go above $3/day.
The point is: everything you might think you know about bitcoin's viability based on how it worked from 2009-2014 doesn't apply from then on. The scarcity and hype led to a speculative bubble, but from my perspective it appears doomed. Whatever niche it might have had on Dark Web black markets will be replaced by some other mechanism. When speculation stops its value will plummet and no longer subsidize mining. Mining will stop, which will make the difficulty easier again, but the reward rate continues to dwindle, forcing miners to require higher transaction fees. If those transaction fees aren't enough to cover the costs of mining, then more miners will stop. And so the block chain network will erode.
E.g. if your client's default fee is .001 bitcoins or whatever, back in the day that was super cheap but now it's $15. But the intrinsic cost of carrying out that transaction has in real-world terms probably gone down rather than up. So you'd expect the market to arrive at roughly the same USD-valued equilibrium regardless of the BTC-USD conversion rate, but this clearly hasn't happened.
So in practice there is no market for crypto transactions because everybody just uses some default transaction fee. Yeah?
The people most discouraged by high fees of cookie-cutter coins are the exact sort of low-effort attempts that are trying to capitalize on blockchain mania, instead of leveraging the technology for its specialized merits. This isn't strangling innovation: it's a first-layer filter that separates the wheat from the chaff.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/7oxi53/developer_...
> I feel some are using our rise to illustrate the absurdity of cryptocurrency pricing (http://uk.businessinsider.com/dogecoin-cryptocurrency-has-ma... for example). To me, in an environment where a cryptoasset with $30 USD equivalent transaction fees has a market cap of over a quarter of trillion dollars, I don't think we're the absurd one. Yes we take ourselves less seriously, but that doesn't mean we're not serious behind the scenes. We're a 4 year old currency with transaction fees barely over a cent and significantly higher throughput than most other cryptocurrencies.
EDIT: Ross has asked me to point out the continuing development at https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/pulls . Version 1.14 is apparently on its way.
One reason could be the high valuations are creating a tunnel vision that's hyper-focused on realizing returns rather than adding additional value.
Here's one theory: http://danariely.com/2008/11/20/what%E2%80%99s-the-value-of-...
And, blockchain innovation isn't just Dapps. There are likely many markets that would benefit from several aspects of blockchain technologies that we've yet to come up with.