Crypto is so large, complex and fast-moving that it takes thousands of hours to grasp.
If I'd make a list of 100 questions regarding crypto, an exam so to speak, I am reasonably sure that this silent majority can't even answer 5% of the questions.
Because they don't know crypto. At all.
You're right that cryptocurrency enthusiasts are always generating new work and coming up with new ideas. Actually, they do this a lot more easily than other domains, because the fact that their entire field is a scam means there are a lot fewer of those pesky roadblocks like "the idea not actually accomplishing the thing you think it does" to contend with.
The fact is that nearly all cryptocurrency projects rest on one of a few obviously-false premises. Like "systems that require every participant to store the entire history of transactions forever scale well", or "people in the real world want every transaction they make to be completely irreversible", or "digital legers are guaranteed to accurately track the state of real-world objects". If you dismiss these, you can dismiss all the projects that depend on them without needing to know the difference between a MerkleCat and a SatoshKitty.
Have you heard of mina?
Tragedy of the commons is fully evident in the bitcoin block size debacle.
More like, everything old is new again. Nicholas Weaver called it "speedrunning 500 years of bad economic history".
It really doesn't. But that is a convenient way to dismiss criticism from everyone who isn't a crypto insider (which is a self-fulfilling prophecy -- the people who spend that much time on it will necessarily be bought into it, the people who are critical will have given up caring about it at some point so will never have the necessary "credentials" to talk about it).
Not a very good way to convince me of cryptocurrencies' greatness by saying 'oh its too complicated to understand, but trust me its big'.
i'm not very into crypto - and everytime i look it feels like another speculative bubble but this time the speculators are even more hyped.
There are non-technical heuristics that we can all employ, through our knowledge of history and sociology, that allow us to identify late stage bubbles (and the pyramids and ponzis that accompany them).
I don’t have a taxi driver but I do have taxi driver equivalents in my life that are currently giving me all the signals I need.
I'd reckon that the average HN cryptocurrency skeptic would do better than the average person who's actually invested in crypto.
This is always how cryptocoin nuts argue.
Do you really need to go through all the history of the system in order to be convinced of the latest state?
What are the different ways to decide who should be the next person that gets to choose the next block of transactions?
Can you hide the amount you’re sending? What about the recipient? Or your own identity?
Can you transfer bitcoin into ethereum or more generally one cryptocurrency into another?
Is it possible to send funds to a recognizable shortname instead of an hexadecimal string?
Are there ways to protect your funds with several keys instead of a single one?
- No
- Another google search for "bitcoin + <your question>"
- "Yes" for literally the rest of the questions.
This wasn't an exam, this was basically an advertisement for "look what cool things you can do with this"
If I got any wrong, whatever. I have literally never researched bitcoin or blockchain. If I got them right, well... nice try on the exam I guess.
Answer to question three is not restricted to Bitcoin. There are many other systems, e.g. Proof of stake (POS).
I have several friends that worked in the industry professionally, for one of the few exchanges that takes KYC and such seriously.
None of them continue to work in that industry. One of them found it to be a net negative on their resume. None of them hold cryptocurrency.
There are many of us that are in fact informed, and have come to the same conclusion: this is internet tulips, and the music is going to stop some day.
Because they don't know Sciento-resonant-homepathics. At all.
Both repeat the same memes to each other in a self-reenforcing echo chamber. The underlying link is to political consensus. Leftist-socialist Twitter is eager to say that socialism is good because Bitcoin is bad. Trumpist-conservativist Twitter loves to say that Bitcoin is good because Joe Biden is bad. Nihilistic crypto permabulls are so hyped up that they jump into every thread to defend their favorites and their negativity is usually limited to the dismissive "sorry you want to be poor".
It never really goes anywhere. Someone comes up with a new crypto narrative - adoption, value, environmental impacts, human interest - and it's all you hear about for the next month. If you try to find good information you are presented with an opaque wall of obvious scams, not as obvious scams, and people who believe or do not believe in them.
There is interesting stuff going on, but the people studying it carefully are so hard to find through all the noise now.
It's easier when there's a bear market.
The thing is, regular money is, from a certain perspective, also a "scam". A lot of the financial system is effectively make-believe, with massive conflicts of interest at every corner and dynamics that keep working because everyone believes they should - until, for one reason or another, they stop believing, and then you have 2008.
Crypto is just another big mountain of make-believe systems (and getting bigger with every new contraption), but it is so young that the games of pretend are still very visible; and the key actors in crypto are different from the key actors in regular finance, which means it gets a bad rap from the latter. But if it can survive long enough (say, 30 or 40 years), people will just stop pointing out the "scam" and will go along with it, because "why not? If it works, it works".
I'm not aware of any non-government-backed fiat currency which has gained widespread use in the history of humanity. And in fact all of the fiat currencies I know of originated as representative money.
Bitcoin is not widely accepted in exchange for things of values, and I see no reason to believe that will ever change. Being able to spend it is the "killer app" of cryptocurrencies, and none of them have actually implemented it, despite many, many attempts.
No, technically fiat money has value because it is accepted by a government to settle taxes. Which is why it loses value dramatically when a state collapses or otherwise becomes irrelevant to the local economy. Because traditionally the state itself was the issuer of such currency, already we have a massive conflict of interest at the very start: when the state pays out his own debts in its own currency, it's effectively asking his creditors to believe that currency has some value in the real world, while also telling them exactly how much that is supposed be. To "solve" this problem they invented central banks, which are supposed to keep governments away from the process of determining the actual value of a currency, if you believe that they are as independent as they proclaim. In the end, what matters is that enough people believe that certain arrangements are fair, and that the government will still be there tomorrow asking them for taxes. As long as that's true, one might well use the currency as a unit to settle private trades too, but that is a consequence of the original belief.
> I'm not aware of any non-government-backed fiat currency which has gained widespread use in the history of humanity
The key in this sentence is "widespread", which is something you can redefine pretty arbitrarily and hence move goalposts as required. In practice, other tokens have been used here and there, but in the end, what wins tends to be government-backed tokens for the simple reason that authorities will always enjoy a right to put you in prison if you don't settle your taxes in the currency they desire.
If you look at it from a technical perspective, any collapsed state where the local currency has been wiped out and internal trades are settled in USD or EUR (a pretty common occurrence), in practice is already using an non-government-backed token, something on which nobody in the local economy has any control. To these areas, it doesn't really matter that the USD will be accepted by the US Federal Government to settle taxes; they just need a unit, and since this unit is accepted at the fringes of their system, well, might as well use it internally too.
> Being able to spend it is the "killer app" of cryptocurrencies
No, being able to convert into other tokens at the fringes is the killer app. Which quite a few cryptocurrencies do have, although in an extremely fragile state. The longer they keep them up, though, the easier it gets, as more and more people believe that the underpinning arrangements are fair and exchanges will still be here tomorrow to exfiltrate value to prison-avoiding currencies.
Not true. There are quite a few places in the world where the de facto dominant currency is not the currency the local government requires for taxes, fees, etc.
In fact, the origin of using taxes + coinage goes back to a pragmatic way for ancient kings to not have to organize the logistics of feeding and housing a large army. Pay the soldiers in coin. Require citizens to pay a tax in the same coin. Boom, they self organize.
Money itself came about far earlier, and was independently invented in multiple places. The example most people look at is temple complexes in the Levant, where debt records came first, and currency second. It was an adaptation of earlier gift economy behavior to enable scaling to groups too large to have intrinsic social trust, and allowing for specialization of labor in building and maintaining the temples.
David Graeber's book will educate you about all this.
> There are quite a few places in the world where the de facto dominant currency is not the currency the local government requires
If you'd read the rest of my comment, you would have seen that I explicitly address this case. Instead you went for a pointless appeal to authority about thousand-year-old situations that don't matter to the current environment.
Before the 1900s the vast majority of currencies were valued based on their precious metal content (gold or silver), not government fiat.
> you: Before the 1900s the vast majority of currencies were valued based on their precious metal content (gold or silver), not government fiat.
ORLY? I didn't know that. Oh wait I literally said it in the comment you replied to.
Bitcoin in its current form should not be seen as a payment currency, instead as digital gold. A new asset class similar to actual gold/silver, real estate, stocks, etc.
Something to put part of your wealth in, hoping it appreciates over time. And as Bitcoin appreciates over time so well so far (12 years of 200% appreciation per year on average), it doesn't really make sense to spend Bitcoin. It is deflationary by design.
Bitcoin already is a killer "app" as such. An accessible way for anybody to preserve/grow wealth, a hedge against inflation and the lack of return on a normal savings account.
Your take on crypto for payments is needlessly pessimistic. It's inevitable, the winner just isn't clear yet.
Legal tender also only applies to paying public debts (i.e. taxes)... not paying a business.