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Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

> Most of the projects with the highest market cap in the space either don't do anything, don't plan on doing anything and don't have any purpose.

The second most valued crypto-currency is Ethereum. And the entire ecosystem around it does plan on doing a lot of things, starting with decentralised finance.

There are also efforts to layer a network on top of Bitcoin in a bid to counter-act Ethereum. And competing networks like Diem (Facebook, Spotify, Uber...), CENTRE (Coinbase / Circle...), Stellar (Stripe...) that aim to replace the current payments infrastructure.

Then there are cross-chains like Polkadot, Cosmos, Polygon et al that try to make all of these disparate blockchains inter-programmable.

Agree that pump and dump schemes seem like the norm, but that's like saying Internet has no utility and is crap because there's porn, spam, and malware all around.

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I said most because indeed most of the innovation, both technical and cultural originates from Ethereum. But DOGE, XRP, ADA, LTC, BCH, TRON, ETC. EOS, NEO, BSV are all in the top 25 and have nothing to show for it despite being some of the oldest players in the space. The L2 projects on Bitcoin are not new and they've never brought anything revolutionary. And I think BTC is fine without L2, it's a very different philosophy from ETH and I can respect that. I just don't think it does or will ever deliver the typeof value that ETH and the projects hosted on it do.

Polygon, Cosmos or other innovative L1 projects like Avalanche, Algorand or HBAR all sit at 9 digit mcap - which is certainly very high but still annoyingly low when you consider that DOGE is worth 77 billion dollars and BSC, whose sole purpose is to make scams out of ETH projects and run them on a centralized chain, sits close to 100 billion dollars.

> BSC, whose sole purpose is to make scams out of ETH projects and run them on a centralized chain, sits close to 100 billion dollars

Scams are big business, but that just illustrates how delusional and bubbly these are; is BSC, a thing I'd never heard of before, really of equivalent value to .. Square? Lockheed Martin? Target? AirBnB? AMD? NTT? Uber?

https://companiesmarketcap.com/page/2/

BSC is a Eth competitor by Binance.

Gas costs in ETH have been at historical highs, making it uneconomical for players under 5-6 figures of capital to do basic transactions, let alone yield-farm / manage positions, so various DeFi dApps have moved over to less congested chains like BSC and Solana.

Sure, lots of scam projects due to cheaper deployment costs (again low gas fees vs Eth), but legitimate projects too: see PancakeSwap, which started out as a Uni clone, but has arguable expanded to offer more / different set of features.

Speaking more broadly, yes, we're in a crazy bubble, but that's really the case across all asset classes at the moment due to rampant central bank printing. Scams are proliferating in equities too, see SPACS.

Not to trot out the "this time is different" meme, but unlike the '17/'18 cycle, you have far fewer whitepaper copy-pasta scam ICOs and way more legitimate projects; with real teams, real users, real use-cases. Plus, institutions are actually ape-ing in, so take that for what you will.

IMO pace of development and adoption will only accelerate from here on the back of an already "mature" internet and mobile ecosystem + generational familiarity/acceptance of digital value in the youth.

As someone who grew up during the transition from analog-digital, crypto gives me mega 90s/00s internet vibes, especially the feeling of inevitability around the DeFi space.

There is no rationale here to be found, You are comparing an insane bubble (Doge, etc.) to a regular bubble (Avalanche, etc.).

People have completely lost the value of money, do you realize how much money is $4.5 billion?

In 2007 Apple had a market cap of 80 billion and a P/E ratio of 26, it had revolutionary products on the market that were clearly going to change an entire industry while at the same time bringing in steady revenue, can you imagine how much it would be worth today in this bubble?

People have completely lost the value of money.

I could not agree more, I've been so heated over the last year looking for any sort of rationale but this greed fueled fake currency explosion is driving me insane. I understand the tech, I don not understand the hype.

I mean 80 billion in 2007 dollars would be $100 trillion today. So 4.5 billion today is obviously a lot less money using your example.

you need to adjust for inflation if you're going to use a valuation that is 14 years old.

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