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Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

I have been around in the crypto space for a significant amount of time (think $700 BTC) and have started two startups which use blockchain tech to a significant degree.

But I am very disappointed in BTC and ETH. BTC did not become “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” and we haven’t seen the explosion of uses-cases I hoped to see from ETH (like tokenization and trading of real-world assets). There’s a ton of froth and solutionism in this space, which is OK, but it also understandably puts off a lot of people who see it as a scam-ridden wasteland.

That’s to say nothing of the Tether black swan to come.

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I've been around since I read about it on slashdot in 2009. Was one of the first online retailers accepting bitcoin for purchases (late 2010). And I completely agree.

Monero is the 'ideological' best cryptocurrency in my opinion, and I've hedged my bets across a handful of coins that I think at least offer something valuable to the future space.

Bitcoin has the first mover advantage and although bastardized into a 'gold like store of value' completely detached from its original use case I'd still want to own a decent amount because why fight momentum.

I agree with everything you say (wild west token scams, tether backing and sketchy accounting) but I think there is too much benefit at the core for one to disregard the entire space. The cream will rise to the top.

>BTC did not become “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,”

I understand that people are disappointed by this thus seeing the idea of BTC as a whole as a "failure", but given the fundamental properties of the system (finite supply, distributed network) it was never possible for BTC to become a currency used widely in everyday high volume transactions. Impossible.

Hal Finney even recognized this in early discussions predicting BTC wouldn't be used in high volume but more likely as a reserve asset, which BTC can absolutely be. Functioning as a digital gold, despite people's aversion or annoyance at this concept. Acting in concert w/ other payment methods or fiat currencies used for payments, taxes, commerce, transactions. A store of value to complement inevitable debasement or dilution of uncapped supplied fiat.

Sure but Hal probably didn’t realize layer 2 solutions such as Lightning Network were possible, with low fees and fast transaction times using bitcoin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network

I see that as third party rent seeking behavior and a bit of a co-opting.

And that's fine, because the beauty of satoshi releasing it as open source spawned an entire ecosystem of ideas and implementations, so while his 'baby' may not be what he envisioned the basic idea and problems solved live on through evolution.

BTC did not become “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”…

It certainly has when you consider that by cash Satoshi meant cash as a bearer instrument.

Unlike a federal reserve note—a piece of paper—that represented the thing that’s valuable—gold, bitcoin itself is the thing of value.

> I hoped to see from ETH (like tokenization and trading of real-world assets)

For ETH to trade real-world assets it needs everything else that the real world already provides: laws, courts, verification systems. Hell, it actually needs that even for digital systems.

Correct. Blockchain is only able to extend its guarantees to concepts wholly encapsulated by the blockchain. That's the reason only "currencies" have been successful thus far. The boundary between the blockchain and the real world is not a surmountable one - not with the guarantees of the blockchain anyways. And once you get rid of the guarantees it's just a slow, inefficient database.

This is why, try as people might (in over a decade) they have yet to achieve literally anything that isn't a currency with it.

I think this is not quite true. You can represent real world events and data with oracles. This is being now through Chainlink for things like security price data. Of course, it's probably not so simple to keep oracles in sync with increasingly niche real world data.

> You can represent real world events and data with oracles.

You can represent them, but that's about it.

For Ethereum contracts to be enforceable in the real world (and even in the digital world) you need significantly more than just representation.

> That’s to say nothing of the Tether black swan to come.

Black swan refer to unexpected events, right?

By black swan I mean that I'm convinced something bad will happen with Tether, but I don't know what. It's like Rumsfelds' "known unknowns" [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns

It will be interesting to see what happens when those who exit at the top move into USDTether and try to cash out.

That's a white swan. Unknown unknowns are black swans.

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