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Im in the same boat. Started with bitcoin in 2013, bought ethereum in the presale, did freelance app development for all sorts of crypto startups (including coinbase). Was a true believer in the technique. But over the years it became clear it was never going to have a big impact. We went from people armiring the tech, to people with no knowledge about the tech, but with big dollar signs in their eyes. Then in 2016 I decided to sell all my crypto coins and move on to a different field. In hindsight, I lost out on millions. But ah well, cant forsee the future. Those crypto bros who think they can are just deluded. What theyre doing was never any better than gambling.

My uncle used to brag about how good of a blackjack player by talking about how he would win enough to pay off the cruise he was gambling on. We never had the heart to tell him that all that does is prove that he got lucky; professional blackjack players only average a return of 3-5% profit.

That's how I feel about the crypto (and to a lesser extent stock) bros. The future is unknowable, and even people who trade these thing professionally make fairly marginal gains (that they make up for in quantity); saying you made millions from bitcoin just says "this guy got really lucky!".

"We never had the heart to tell him that all that does is prove that he got lucky; professional blackjack players only average a return of 3-5% profit."

I would say, that depends who they are playing against?

Not in blackjack, you're playing against the house.

Yeah, I confused the game.

Sure, it's an average. They lose big on some hands, and win big on others, hopefully winning a bit more than losing. My understanding is that it's a volume-business.

I sold out in 2017 after seeing Bitcoin on CNBC for the first time. I figured that meant the dream was over.

I agree with this. I hate that I actually tried to use bitcoin as currency. My first transaction, I bought a bag of weed on silkroad early enough on that those coins would be worth ~$1m right now. But I smoked it.

Hey, you can say you were rich enough to smoke a million dollars. There's some street cred to that.

> I'll gladly exchange crypto's price for less crypto bros. My cost basis is around $150 so I have a long ways to go before I care that much.

This entire viewpoint made a lot of sense until this final sentence. Your point is that you’re okay the market crashed because your cost basis is 150$ and BTC is still at 28.5k$?

This is a great perspective and I largely agree with it. There needs to be a "return to sanity" market-wide.

That said, regarding your perspective on crypto's limited utility, I just want to point out there's a crypto few folks have paid attention to which actually addresses your issues head-on: Nano is a feeless and PoW-less crypto which has been around for a few years and was started by one of the early contributors to Bitcoin. Nano is not a "hot coin." It's seen little market speculation and it's not programmable and riding the smart contract wave; it does one thing well: transacting. It's free (as in truly and completely free, fee-less, zero cost), near-instant (<1 second transactions/validations), and green a(~0.1Wh per transaction, or for context about 1/6 millionth of the energy cost of a single Bitcoin transaction). It's also decentralized, without being mined/staked, so it's not controlled according to the interests of miners/whales.

This seems to me the holy grail, so I'm always surprised that discussions of crypto on HN don't mention it or even that that veterans like yourself don't seem to know about it. Maybe it's still too young/obscure? But I think it will see significant interest post-crash as it fulfills the initial promise of crypto—it's money you can by a coffee with, send across borders at zero cost, make micro-micro payments with, etc... you know, like real money, just better.

But it's not money you can buy coffee with... In April it spiked up to more than 5x what it's trading at now. In the last few weeks it seems to be trending down, isn't this just as speculative as any other coin?

It will need to become more stable, certainly, but I think that's a function of how the market interacts with it. If the majority of Nano is being priced based on speculation through exchanges, it will continue to have this kind of volatility. But if money continues to enter the system via other use-cases, aka its actual utility, volatility will diminish. Pricing becomes less about speculating on it as an asset and more about utility as a means of transaction.

The reason you don't see this with other cryptos, by the way, is that their utility is severely limited (in a technical sense) and therefore the underlying value is entirely speculative.

> remains a solution looking for a problem

> Apart from a way of ... storing value

Do you think USD (or some other fiat) is a good medium for storing value? If not, can you see that your latter claim invalidates the former?

By "potential" do you mean "potential stated by crypto investors & startup founders" or like...something more objective?

"potential" like a decentralized currency as Satoshi imagined.

Do you know of any other way to send electronic cash with no intermediaries (EDIT: financial institutions)? It's the first sentence of the whitepaper and ignored by 99% of people, including highly paid software developers.

Whether or not you need that will depend on where the world goes. A CDBC social-credit system world presents a lot of incentives to use something else.

And if you do need it, you need it ahead of time. Good luck trying to learn and set up networks from scratch when they are considered illegal etc.

It is ignored because for the vast majority of customers, the intermediary is not a problem. In fact, the intermediary is usually an asset. I know when I buy something with my credit card or PayPal, that payment processor has me covered if the seller tries to screw me over.

The people who hate the intermediaries are the sellers, because they don't like losing a small % of their sale to a payment processor. But sellers do not have the power to change this. They have to accept payment in whatever form customers are willing to provide it in. Customers aren't going to move away from PayPal and credit cards without a good reason, and so far crypto has failed to provide that reason.

> They have to accept payment in whatever form customers are willing to provide it in. Customers aren't going to move away from PayPal and credit cards without a good reason, and so far crypto has failed to provide that reason.

In general this is just an illustration of the racket between banks and card companies, since customers really only seek to pay using the payment options their bank provides upon opening an account, although I guess that's not a surprise given Visa started out under Bank of America[0].

If banks provided a crypto wallet that had all the benefits of regular accounts like direct deposit and FDIC insurance, which they might eventually do[1], I doubt many would hesitate to use it. The only barrier would be if using the crypto wallet presented a fee that Visa and the rest of the card industry loves to keep a secret by charging the merchant instead, with the merchant passing on those costs to the customer in the form of higher MSRPs.

0: https://minesafetydisclosures.com/blog/2019/5/29/part-l-a-hi...

1: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/what-is-a-central-bank-d...

Cryptocurrency is too volatile to use as currency. Even with all the recent inflation in USD, the gallons of milk I earn per hour hasn't changed all that much in the past year. If my local dairy accepted Bitcoin, I'd have no idea how many gallons I could buy with an hour's labor next month.

> Do you know of any other way to send electronic cash with no intermediaries (EDIT: financial institutions)

In practice you need a bank account to use bitcoin, there's essentially nobody who uses bitcoin that doesn't have a bank account, so the "no intermediaries" thing isn't really meaningful, nobody cares about this.

If you live near a Bitcoin ATM[0] or in one of the 10 US states[1] where LocalBitcoins still operates, you can transact solely in cash.

[0]: https://www.bitcoin.com/get-started/how-to-locate-and-use-a-...

[1]: https://coingeek.com/localbitcoins-restricted-to-only-10-sta...

You can't just walk up to a bitcoin ATM, put in cash and get out bitcoin, you typically need an account associated with the ATM that requires you to be linked with a bank account or otherwise mandating very invasive KYC that basically turns them into a functional intermediary in the sense that they can track all your payments and arbitrarily deny service based on your identity like e.g. coinbase.

LocalBitcoins is not practical, nobody wants to meet up in the streets to trade cash for bitcoins.

With the ATM taking some of your money for its convenience...

Yes, for now it is not needed.

The Canadian truckers didn't have bank accounts for a moment (maybe still ongoing). As financial prosecution, eventually algorithmically (have you seen on the threads on HN recently about people getting permabanned from various services for seemingly no reason?) ramps up, and CDBC rolls out...

There is no constitutional guarantee for the freedom to use payment networks so this inevitably will be used as leverage for compliance with anything governments/national banks want

It was Canadian truckers yesterday, Russians today - are we so naive to think it will be nobody tomorrow? Or are we ok with the exiling of people from society as long as its somebody we don't like?

People under sanctions are also sanctioned from using cryptocurrency under penalty of law.

> with no intermediaries?

You're connecting to some nodes, right, to send the transaction? Those are intermediaries. Very very few holders of crypto run their own nodes, these days.

This is something I've been wondering about lately. People still talk about the blockchain, but how relevant is the blockchain anymore? It seems like most people never directly interact with it.

I meant financial institutions but you are correct yes

> Do you know of any other way to send electronic cash with no intermediaries?

Well, you rely on a bunch of intermediaries, but the profit incentive outweighs the power of any large (but still minority) intermediary blocking specific transactions at will.

Good point, I meant financial institutions, which is actually the term used in the whitepaper, not intermediaries.

I will probably trade my karma for this comment, but have you looked into other protocols ? You mention the processing fees and the finality time, I've heard of several projects that are already better than Ethereum on this such as Hedera Hashgraph, Avalanche or Algorand.

Saying that "crypto has not lived up to its potential at all" merely 12 years after Satoshi mined the first bitcoin is laughable if anything. It took 15 years of the internet to have Facebook. It took 27 years (!!) of the internet to have something like TikTok. How can you say that crypto will amount to nothing ?

> It took 15 years of the internet to have Facebook. It took 27 years (!!) of the internet to have something like TikTok.

That's an amazingly ridiculous statement. There's been bulletin boards and chat on the Internet about as long as it has existed. All manner of utility has existed on the Internet since the beginning. Neither Facebook nor TikTok were required for the Internet to be useful.

The best uses for cryptocurrency are speculation and crime. Even the speculation requires some amount of criminality because speculators only get a payout if more rubes "invest".