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Comment by will_brown | Hacker News Reader

>who would want to build a game on top of a platform that’s currently limited to ~15 state changes per second? And where each of these state changes cost money?

Every developer interested in making (a lot) of Easy money by riding the crypto bubble. Maybe the question should be what gamer would be interested in paying for such a game (i.e. paying significant sums for pictures of cats and paying more at every turn...you can’t even give a picture of a cat away free without paying gas), but the answer is the same...any gamer wanting to make money off the cryptobubble.

Blockchain can be marketed with terms like immutable, decentralized, and smart contract all anyone wants. However the reality is it’s all a race to the bottom based on greed and speculation.

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When you say it like that, speculating that people will continue to be greedy seems like a smart bet.

You’ll want to look into counterparty risk before placing such a bet, in which case you’ll likely find the house tends to win.

As far as I know pictures of cats are hosted in some centralized server. https://medium.com/loom-network/your-crypto-kitty-isnt-forev... Anyhow I agree with your point

Greed and speculation today becomes genuine mass distrust and dislike of fiat tomorrow, don't underestimate cognitive dissonance.

No, not necessarily. It probably won't. Crypto in general continues to be pretty bad as currency, particularly because of security issues (your 'best' options for storage are a physical wallet or a sketchy and/or uninsured exchange) and volatility (who wants money that could become 25% less useful tomorrow?).

Or potentially genuine mass distrust and dislike of cryptocurrency tomorrow, don't underestimate the cognitive dissonance of a bubble pop?

In my eyes, it's dangerous to crypto that advocates spout absolutisisms about crypto. With a fledgling technology and market, anything is possible, and we should be honest about the fact. Otherwise, you risk blowing up expectations to where a potential crash back to reality gives everyone an irreparable distrust and dislike of crypto anarchists akin to that of Wall Street bankers.

And then the powers that be will mock anarchism for it's corruption and greed, paint the technologist as a devil, and write history books warning of the folly of decentralization. Anarchy is dead, long live anarchy!

So maybe the last part was overblown, but in seriousness, when people lose a lot of money, they get very angry. I'd hate to be the ideology at the receiving end of that anger.

We wrote the same sentence, but I am posting it anyway...”greed and speculation today becomes genuine mass distrust and dislike of all things cryptocoin/token tomorrow.”

It’s all fun and games until the IRS comes knocking at your door for failing to pay taxes on each and every cryptokitty transaction.

People thought blockchain and Bitcoin was a way to escape fiat...turns out mining is taxed as ordinary income, investing transactions as capital gains, and the IRS only accepts fiat.

People thought Ethereum smart contracts were a way to escape the legal system (the code being Law and all)...turns out people could’nt trust these smart contracts to do what they thought and were marketed to do (DAO); turns out the code isn’t the Law because the parties to the smart contracts could just fork and break the contract; and it turns out the SEC can actually regulate and prosecute ICOs that violate securities laws.

Who wants to file a tax return and pay ordinary income on every cryptokitty they birth or capital gains on every cryptokitty they sell?

Maybe I can get ahead of the ball and start offering “stripe atlas for self directed IRA LLCs for tax free cryptocoin/kitty trading”.

Am suddenly interested in building a product that handles your taxes when you give it read access to your Coinbase account.

You'll need to support a lot more than just importing Coinbase transactions. The site bitcoin.tax lets you import from 17 different sources and, despite its name, handles nearly all digital currencies, not just bitcoin.

However, nothing currently exists that seamlessly handles scenarios like cryptokitties, or when tokens are automatically bought/sold behind-the-scenes of a dapp via 0x, etc.

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