Vitalik Buterin is worried about crypto's future
time.com
time.com
But I've been watching it with interest and what interested me the most was the governance aspects of it. But lately, when I look at the space, it is really difficult to see any real meaningful interest in doing things properly. I think I am invited everyday on discord or telegram to this or that "DAO", which really are nothing but pump and dump scams with a coat of governance onto them.
I do wonder, is this a feature or a bug? Humans might be naturally greedy and maybe these hyper-marketized mechanisms simply bring out the worst in us.
But I will say, I really admire Vitalik and his vision, I read his blog and I love it. It makes me hopeful but maybe he might just be too optimistic. Things are not how we'd like them to be but how they are, this is a very important lesson in politics.
It is hard to argue that "they don't represent crypto" when they are 90% of what people see, and many people's first exposure to it, but of course, they don't represent crypto. They bring zero innovation, except for the best marketing copy to bring in gullible victims. Real projects (for instance, zkSync) are a lot more quiet about their marketing.
I don’t agree. The people who run traditional scams know that what they’re doing is a scam, and they take precautions to avoid criminal prosecution. This deters general people from trying to do the same thing.
Crypto has this veneer of “innovation” and “disruption” that everyone has seen play out over the past decade, with huge winners (Amazon, Uber, etc.). And others are jumping on the bandwagon. They don’t believe they’re running a scam, or at least they believe they’re operating in the Wild West of no regulations and everything is fair game.
There are definitely people doing crypto stuff who would not be otherwise running cons on a street corner.
With respect to DAOs, I still believe this is the most interesting crypto related innovation since smart contracts/dApps. I hope that the eventual bursting of the bubble doesn't throw this baby out with the bathwater. The democratization of capital raising, free flow of capital across jurisdictions, and rethinking of governance strike me as good things for all of humanity.
Those who are genuinely interested in one or more aspects (the mathematics, the technology, the smart contracts, the governance aspects, the anti-banking aspects, the innovation, and/or trustless funds transfer). And those who are primarily attracted to the space due to the potential for profit.
For the former group, it's a bug. For the latter group, it seems to be a feature.
In my experience, the former group are fading away. Either loosing interest as the space doesn't live up to promises, or driven away all the scammers and other shitty behaviour that seems to follow the people who are primarily attracted by profits.
In my own personal experience, I was attracted by the technology and really enjoyed learning about and improving on the technology. But I didn't like the general feeling of the space, so I've faded away. Even liquidated all my holdings so I never have to deal with the space again.
There is no incentive to do anything properly in cryptocurrency development because it puts monetisation before use-case, so you get all the money up front with no commitment to deliver anything (whether useful or not) and can often remain anonymous to boot. Whether you call this a bug or a feature simply depends upon how scrupulous you are.
[0] https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi...
Some of the Bitcoin devs realized this early on. Ethereum, for whatever reason, didn't and it's been scamville ever since.
Unfortunately, Ethereum communities still seem to socialize and organize on centralized platforms like Slack, Discord, and Twitter.
I just think technologists need to "think dumber". Its easier to make money if you have money. Some people get lucky for no reason whatsoever. Some people win big out of raw talent or effort, and then they become criminals. It costs money to use computers. Some people like status and gambling.
Congratulations, you now understand how proof-of-stake works - and why it’s a bad underpinning of cryptocurrencies, although bad in a different way than proof of work. Destroy the environment or make the rich richer; pick your poison.
I've personally used cryptocurrencies to bypass expensive international bank transfer fees when moving money between family members in different countries. To me, they had beneficial value for this. I'm not saying that's enough to warrant their existence, but saying they literally have no value whatsoever is clearly not true. So the question is whether they provide enough value, compared to startups. In my opinion, a lot of silicon valley startups in many industries (social media and advertising being big ones) also don't provide anything worthwhile to the world, so at least those are about on par with cryptocurrencies.
To me, investing in those startups is no different than investing in cryptocurrencies in the sense that they are equally negative forces on the world.
Well, of course! If crypto is useful as a counter-balance to authoritarian governments, then the value of crypto is rooted in bad (other) government. Who wants to live in a world where all governments are shit but we can still move money around?
Crypto might be a temporary plaster over some wounds, but we still need to close the wounds.
What changes with crypto is that it gives people the chance to choose (a) who they affiliate with (b) on what terms and (c) allows unilateral disassociation at any time.
Think of it this way: imagine if getting citizenship to any country in the world was something that involved no bureaucracy and could be as cheap as getting a cellphone sim card.
Save from mass incarceration, there is nothing that authoritarian governments could do to stop people from participating in other economies. People would suddenly be able to participate in a "global market of governance models" without even necessarily having to relocate physically.
Authoritarian governments will of course try to stop this, but my bet is they will lose all type of support when the technology is accessible to the middle-class and they get to compare their relative status with the whole world, not just the local society.
This would lead (I hope) to the realization that governments are only necessary when they serve the people and that will be the most important piece to fix the current broken lack of "checks and balances".
We've got a glimpse of what could happen because of the pandemic and the millions of people who realized that they could do their job from anywhere in the world, and how lots of countries responded by offering "remote work" and "digital nomad" visas. Now imagine if more countries acting like Estonia and start offering "e-residency" programs. The countries would start competing among themselves to see who can attract the most people / most productive people.
It's the possibility of self-sovereignty that is important, not the actual realization.
The life of a tenant farmer in the Phillippines does not only suck because of Duterte; it also sucks because the wealthy family they work for is comfortable with inefficient plantation-based farming.
Now, its certainly possible that crypto could give people more access to the world market, and thereby improve their situation. Rural communities in Bangladesh now have YouTube channels showing the amazing talent they have for cooking. Its a weird world.
But there's a dark side to global exposure. Some Malaysians got rich from their global stock market in the 90's without having to relocate, but it didn't end well because the investment was in speculative consumer goods like real estate. Crypto doesn't have to end this way - it could enable real invention that would not be possible with rigid, local fiat currencies. But right now, crypto feels like a casino pizza party, and I'm increasingly worried.
> oligarchs, who will only be further advantaged by unregulated markets.
No one is saying about "unregulated markets". The idea is about having regulations being localized and based on the principles of much smaller communities. Take the principles from Localism applied to "virtual city-states", if you will.
> wealthy family (...) is comfortable with inefficient plantation-based farming.
Because they have a monopsony on the labor. On a world where you can decouple "where you live" from "where you work", this goes right out of the window. And it goes both ways: it can be either because the locals leave the place because they can find better opportunities, but also because people from other, wealthier places might look at these places as an opportunity for a low-cost of life and cheap labor. Go checkout /r/digitalnomad and you will see how many people are already doing or planning to do such a thing.
For a more cynical person, this means "gentrification". For someone looking at things at a wider-scale, it means that people could eventually be able to do something that was only possible for the elites controlling multinational corporations.
In what way? Imagine NFTs take over as the mechanism by which we join and leave organizations. "Have you ever been a member of the communist party" is now a machine checkable property. Any organization can deny access to any person who has any affiliation (now or ever in the past) that the organization doesn't like.
You can not prove that people identities can/will be easily correlated. If there are people handling multiple avatars successfully, you will see them as two separate entities!
What you call "re-identifying" is basically correlating known identities across different systems. But what about alts?
You can quickly go to keybase and find out my "public" reddit account, and someone with direct access to reddit databases could even use the extra information to find some of my alts. But I can bet real money that no one could precisely look at any random reddit account and say "this account is/is not an alt from rglullis".
In a world where creating identities is infinitely cheap to create, you can not rely on identity as a mechanism for censorship or blacklisting.
Can you prove that this will be the case? Given that there is value in integration, I don't actually believe that useful identities will be infinitely cheap to create. In the same way that being able to set up a new email address with zero history doesn't actually mean anything when it comes time to apply to jobs.
Anyway, it is still something to be managed. You just create multiple identities and you work with them to suit the target audience. To go with your "membership to the Communist Party" example, there is nothing stopping any actual communist to have an identity where they act as someone who is not a communist, and use it when needed.
I'm pretty sure the authority (or power) spawns the centralisation, rather than the other way around.
[1] By this I mean that if a platform decides to be ad-funded, they often begin to self-censor to stay in the advertiser's good graces. Over time this gives increasing power to large advertisers to control content - see: Youtube.
It’s mostly greed and naivety.
I think that's true. More broadly, I think it's a totally unfounded belief that computer technology can somehow transcend human nature coupled with a general ignorance, disinterest, or even contempt for non-computer technology.
Take cryptocurrency: in large part its original vision was rooted in contempt for law (a kind of social technology), which just meant it repeated a bunch of mistakes that have been solved in well-developed legal systems, with little to no value-add.
This is an excellent point and the crux of the matter. Technology, particularly software-related technology, provides an amplification effect of the worst of humanity.
I'm reminded of the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where the chimps discover bones as weapons. Well, now that bone is the Internet.
There's this belief amongst technocrats is that we can somehow be saved by technology. A good documentary on this is Adam Curtis' All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.
There was a time when I was proud of working on crypto, and how most of our users were actually, genuinely using our product to evade various forms of abuse from their local authorities. Once prices started going up and and a bunch of people started using it as a get-rich-quick scheme, that rapidly became a vicious cycle with people like me started leaving the ecosystem in disgust, and we lost what pressure existed within crypto-adjancent companies to stay true to the original goals.
This article makes it sound that Vitalik is reaching that state of disillusionment as well. Shame, he's one of the last few "true believers" I know of.
This is one of cases where the term "crypto" is genuinely confusing. I'd easily believe your claim if it were about cryptography, but I'm highly skeptical about it as applied to cryptocurrency.
I wouldn't be surprised if, when the final history of cryptocurrency is written, its main effects will be judged to have been scams and linguistic confusion.
Don't forget that Ethereum is still a research project. "Denial" and "covering-up" would only apply if the devs were still promising that the base-layer would scale by itself. But ask any serious developer and it is pretty understood that "(Complete) Decentralization, Security, Scalability... pick two" is how things will have to go.
+maximalists
Many years and thousands of faulty Solidity contracts later, I still haven't been entirely vindicated. I certainly missed the boat on the gains, though I still did OK overall with my other moves. As it turns out, both the type of dev and the type of investor Eth attracts have never really changed: both are a bit too awed by the raw tech and its generality to think through the application in more detail than "we can make it and you can buy it".
But hey, it worked, the party is now crowded with apes; it's probably time to exit, though, cause I can't see it staying like this forever.
It's a disingenuous argument, akin to no true scotsman, and a way to pat yourself on the back.
When you step back from the details and take a look at the big picture, you can understand crypto better than when you're too stuck in the reeds.
From the big picture view, you can see Crypto is destroying our planet, doesn't meet most of it's promises, squirms with new promises and redefinitions constantly, is much more complex than alternatives for the few things it does provide, and is rife absolutely rife with scammers.
Sure amongst that morass there may be a few interesting ideas, who knows and who cares, there's interesting ideas in lots of areas and crypto is a distraction from real progress, and it's a destructive force in our world. What a waste of human potential, and limited resources.
Crypto is certainly not destroying our planet.
Yes, "Crypto" does have negative impact on ecosphere through its use of energy and other ressources.
But ... just look ahead, look left and right ... and unless you're walking some trail between the fields looking up from HN on your smartphone .. you're quite likely to see something that humans made. And pretty much regardless of what it is, it'll have had a myriad of various ways of negative impact on the ecosphere.
"Crypto" is far from being even near the top harmful technologies at the moment. Bitcoin is estimated at 0.29 % of global energy use according to here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#Energy_consumption_and...
Besides that, energy is only one of a many technological negative impacts on the ecosphere. Take the millions of destructive chemical compounds that get released through mostly non-Bitcoin technological human deeds.
To counter a potential whataboutism accusation: in most instances where the term gets thrown at someone, is my impression, it is just a poor way of trying to prevent the following. When someone calls out some problem A and another person calls out problem B as a consequence, they are doing it to give some perspective, to have a reference for comparison. Which is absolutely reasonable and useful to do. Why? Because not all problems of the world can/should be solved at the same time. There's simply not enough capacity/ressources/attention to do all. Problems need to be prioritized, which is a political/societal process. To enable this prioritization, comparisons must be made between different issues and references brought up. Something that then gets decried as whataboutism.
No, "Crypto" is certainly not "destroying" our planet in the sense that it should occupy all those people's attention who claim that they're worried about the planet and trying to save it. Those people should turn their heads to their consumption of most everyday items/products/services and other topics.
I think mine is more accurate.
The comment is a series of ad-hominem attacks composed manipulatively.
The rational response is to be careful of anyone attempting such manipulation.
I have had a hard time finding genuinely honest and unbiased perspectives or even descriptions of things in crypto. Happy to know if anyone has any such sources. I'm still trying to honestly just learn about it more. Getting there bit by bit.
I get the opposite impression here. The impression I get is that most aren't even tech people let alone hackers. They are here because they are not knowledgable and want to learn. This forum seems mostly media/business dominated than tech dominated.
But it is very very very clear that cryptocurrencies are not and will never be a raw technological oddity that hackers can play with. Instead, they are things that fundamentally intend to change power structures and the relationships people have with other people or with organizations and institutions. That's not the domain of hacker expertise anymore. As such, discussion is more akin to discussing war or human rights or inequality. All of the "very cool technology" discussion is (rightly, in my mind) subsumed by the much larger discussion of "holy crap, look at the harm that this direction will do to humanity."
You're crusading for the kings of Web2, so they don't lose control.
Humanity will be fine, calm down.
The kings of Web3 are the same as the kings of Web2. Big money investors and capitalism more broadly. Web3 accelerates surveillance capitalism. It is all of the mess of Web2 on steroids.
Continue to fight the tech tho, wonderful thing about web3 is you can't stop it, no matter who you are.
You can certainly organize a public campaign against it though, you're being a useful idiot for them.
Take a step back and ask yourself if that passion of hate is yours or someone else's.
I've published papers in top conferences on EVM analysis. "Read more" is not an especially engaging topic of conversation.
Web3 does not change the systemic barriers that funnel users into platforms and frameworks. It does enable a small number of technologists to become operators while also enabling the rich to turn everything into financial instruments. Yes, some new nerds got to be billionaires. That's the same thing that happened with Web2. Nothing about the fundamentals have changed except now other people can bet on whether I'll buy Product X or Product Y.
> Continue to fight the tech tho, wonderful thing about web3 is you can't stop it, no matter who you are.
Perhaps not. "You can't stop it" is not itself evidence that something is a good thing.
Edit: and now the title has been re-editorialized a second time even though the original one isn't misleading.
It doesn't move that money. It moves around specialty tokens that people speculate are worth that much money.
> the infrastructure for entrepreneurs to build all sorts of new products, from payment systems to prediction markets, digital swap meets to medical-research hubs.
Yeah, no. Those products are a) not new, and b) most of them don't require either ethereum in particular or blockchain in general. It's all speculative smoke and mirrors, chasing investor money.
> Crypto itself has a lot of dystopian potential if implemented wrong
Ah yes. "You're holding it wrong". This is the only outcome of crypto in particular and blockchains in general.
> Buterin hopes Ethereum will become the launchpad for all sorts of sociopolitical experimentation: fairer voting systems, urban planning, universal basic income, public-works projects.
No, it won't. Because the tech not only doesn't solve these problems, but makes these problems significantly worse [1]
> ultimately the goal of crypto is not to play games with million-dollar pictures of monkeys, it’s to do things that accomplish meaningful effects in the real world
No. The ultimate goal of crypto is exactly to play million-dollar games. Just because it was used to send pretend tokens to desperate people who have no meaningful ways of using them, doesn't mean it's accomplished something meaningful in the world.
> The blockchain, he thought, could serve as an efficient method
Blockchain and efficient in one sentence.
> Buterin’s favorite projects on the blockchain. Take Proof of Humanity, which awards a universal basic income—currently about $40 per month—to anyone who signs up
I can't even.
And then they talk about how he "couldn't predict this", or "couldn't foresee that", or "watched with horror and dismay" when something easily predictable happened. All the while praising him for being "fluent in disciplines ranging from sociological theory to advanced calculus to land-tax history."
Clearly he's "fluent" as in "he can come off as knowledgable in a Twitter thread".
See the link below for how all this was clearly predicted.
[1] https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...
If a particular item can be sold at a particular amount with predictable and transparent liquidity it is objectively worth that amount.
Ford doesn't speculate a Ford F-150 is worth $30k, they have customers lined up with cash in hand ready to buy and waiting lists (liquidity), therefore they are objectively worth $30k.
You wouldn't say 1 share of Amazon stock is speculatively worth $3,205. It's objectively worth that, because there's liquidity and an order book right now that will buy it for that price.
--- start quote ---
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/speculation.asp
In the world of finance, speculation, or speculative trading, refers to the act of conducting a financial transaction that has substantial risk of losing value but also holds the expectation of a significant gain or other major value.
--- end quote ---
Crypto is the very definition of speculative trading.
And yes, stocks are as close to be to that as to be indistinguishable in my opinion
> I can't even.
Proof of humanity is a really great project imo (especially in the face of things like worldcoins authoritarian approach). Its not perfect but it is working and doing what it says, theres around 15k people registered with many in south america earning more than their state pension. It also allows other organisations to bring 1p1v to their contracts. Theres some work to be done on privacy layers, but plans are in place. 1 move at a time.
What can't you even? I think its great!
I'm not gonna respond to the rest because it's not worth the time and effort. Please go educate yourself on this topic before you hand-wave away this technology.
Yes, it could. Stocks are pure speculation.
> Please go educate yourself on this topic before you hand-wave away this technology.
If only there was anything in the crypto space to, you know, actually refute any of these points. Alas, in the past decade none have materialized. For every well researched and argued article like the one I linked or the more recent like Moxie's there's inevitably a horde of "go educate yourslef join our discords" and literally zero equally researched and argued articles.
> Ethereum has made a handful of white men unfathomably rich
So if it were a handful of Indian women it would be better?
More to the point, what was the author’s point? Are we to believe that the white men who’ve gotten rich on crypto did something untoward to get those riches? And if so, did they do the bad thing because of their genitalia skin color?
It is stunning that these kinds of lazy, unexamined biases are accepted in non-fringe media outlets.
Either way, I think the bigger point is that it's made a small number of people very wealthy.
It has wildly failed those goals if it’s merely achieved the same outcome as, say, wall st banking.
A major goal for cryptocurrencies as they were initially conceived is that they're a tool for social change. Becoming yet another investment vehicle for the people who already have access to a wealth of investment tools is a complete failure to achieve that goal.
It is what it is. With crypto you have all the tools to stay under the radar, it's the main selling point.
It's always white men who are not happy with just the riches but feel the enormous need to spew whatever opionion they have through traditional media and the interwebz.
You can't complain that journalists who are essentially haters and believe people are inherently bad (much like cops, detectives and attorney generals) then single you out as the bad guys when they inevitably come to the space and have to write a piece on it.
Just to give a quick example from non-crypto industries: nobody is calling out Sergey Brin, Larry Page or the French guy at the helm of LVMH.
That's because their jewish heritage coherently suggested them to just be happy having more money than God, stay under the radar instead of pursuing attention and sociopolitical clout.
Expected nothing less from Time...
You don't need a study, but you need some sort of base to the claim.
Your anecdote tells us nothing, I know many non-whites who got rich from crypto.
Not everything requires a study, but when writing an article you should back your click/race-bait claims up with facts if you just HAVE to put them in there. Maybe just leave it out since it wasn't relevant.
Journalists should cite every claim they make, even if it's tacked on and only a sentence long. Especially if it's a bold race-baiting one.
> What I can't figure out is are you just rules lawyering at this point or do you actually believe its not a problem.
It's a baseless racist assertion that can be taken out without detracting from the article.
MSM loves to race bait. Race relations are rough enough, it's irresponsible.
But when you call them out "oh they don't need to source every sentence". Ok.
> You are not going to ask them to cite the dictionary for each word, would you?
A word is not a claim, that is ridiculous. Noone is disputing the word "white" they are disputing that bitcoin only made a handful of whites richer.
GP can't prove a negative. It's on the journalist to source their assertions.
I personally know a few dozen people who used it in Brazil, Portugal, Japan, and India early on.
I'd say I know more non-whites than whites who used it.
That's just an anecdote, but it's more information than the racist journalist had.