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Comment by jerojero | Hacker News Reader

For a while I have been losing faith in the crypto space, though I've known about it for a really long time I have never really made any significant money in it.

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.

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The NFT space seems to have supercharged pump-and-dump dynamic. While previously the grift seemed somewhat bound to technical people and early(ish) adopters, NFTs have brought in a tidal wave of "creators". The amount of hand waving in the NFT "chill and shill" Twitter spaces is such that I imagine arms are being dislocated from shoulder sockets.

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.

NFTs lower the capital required to "pump" because each token is one-of-a-kind and can be pumped individually. You also don't have to convince a bunch of people that your coin is going to be a valuable, new, currency (as with ICOs). Just that this single collectible (or "collection" of collectibles) is valuable. It helps that collectibles in general are experiencing a bull market (see Pokemon cards).

There are roughly two types of people who participate in (or previously participated in) the cryptocurrency space.

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.

All of these Discord and Telegram "DAOs" are almost always scams. Crypto makes them easier, but they would probably still exist in some shape even without it.

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.

> but they would probably still exist in some shape even without it.

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.

> "it is really difficult to see any real meaningful interest in doing things properly ... is this a feature or a bug?"

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.

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