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> If you know anyone into crypto you would know they talk about it non stop.

Not really. There are a lot of people holding, mining, DCA'ing into projects they believe in who have no trouble at all keeping it to themselves.

Your remarks about gambling are similarly projecting a portion of the community onto the rest. Those traders who treat it as a speculative asset are gambling as you say, and tend to be obsessive in the way you describe, but you seem not to be aware of everyone who deals with crypto differently than you did.

There are a lot of crypto projects that people don't expect to moon, that effectively serve their purpose right now, and will just get better at it in the future. None of what you wrote is nearly as generally true as you made it out to be.

At the same time, I assume that most of the liquidity in the markets come from professionals and the people described in GP, whereas the casual retail/investors you describe tend to not keep their assets on orderbooks or in liquidity pools.

Yep, exactly. I've been working in crypto for 4 years and counting, still haven't purchased a single token as an investment. I don't like downside risk, I like to build product. We've weathered one bear market, we'll weather another.

Thankfully there's cool stuff in the ecosystem that isn't a scam, but it's not newsworthy, so it doesn't go viral.

Can you give some examples of cool stuff that isn't a scam? I'm genuinely curious.

One of the cool parts of crypto is that it enables new forms of social coordination that take place entirely within an online context. We haven't even scratched the surface of what could be possible with DAOs; the UIs and educational materials don't exist yet.

But given how online people are in general (and they're only likely to become more online in the future), it's natural they'll want digitally-native ways to organize themselves, represent ownership, qualify membership, etc.

The shift in concept required here is from viewing a token as "an investment" to viewing it as a form of legible social proof within its community context, which becomes more meaningful as communities grow beyond the "tipping point" where interpersonal proof (think webs-of-trust) is sufficient for coordination. NFTs (yes, they're still around!) are already serving this function for certain experimental communities (and even in less experimental ones, see POAPs).

In general, everything above is still in the experimental, live or die phase. We don't quite know where it's going. But it's pretty damn cool to watch if you're deeply invested in the internet as a medium (and as someone who "grew up online", I absolutely am).

I'm curious to dig into this a bit more. In general, I'm skeptical about those use cases.

* If it's a governance token system where more money == more power...well, I just don't think it's a good idea in general.

* If it's a system that tries to replicate the idea of one person/one vote, you have to have KYC (and re-KYC upon membership transfer) or it devolves into the first case. Then the entity doing KYC has centralized control over membership, so it seems like storing membership info on a ledger doesn't offer any benefits compared to just having a central membership database.

To address the latter case first: what you gain is standardization and interoperability, where the crypto toolbox acts as a protocol. Even if you're doing KYC in a centralized way, you can plug your token/DAO into any tool that supports it and use their interfaces. At least in theory. Good interfaces don't quite exist yet (it's being worked on). I'm sure there's already web2 tools out there, but the ideal web3 case is far lower friction, requiring no web hosting, deployment, trusted middlemen, etc. The proof of this will be in its success or failure, I'm still not sure how it'll play out.

Regarding the former case, of money and power... this one is a little harder. In theory, if you're a part of some community, and a very rich person wanted to fuck up or infiltrate your community by leveraging their wealth, they could probably figure out a way to do it, crypto or not. At least in this case, the existing community members stand to reap some sort of benefit from it, in the sense that a new whale's buy-in will increase the value of their existing holdings. Then they can all cash out and start a new thing someplace else. It has a similar form and moral valence as neighborhood gentrification (but without the racialized element).

I tend to think most communities will solve this by having some external aim of coordination that discourages people from just speculating (which makes sense given that social proof exists relative to the community in question), even if the balance of power is determined based on buy-in. But again, I don't really know how it will play out in practice, if more regular people will actually take up these tools for non-speculation reasons, etc.

“some external aim of coordination that discourages people from just speculating”, i think the word you’re looking for might be “trust”

To be completely honest--and I don't mean to sound mean--that doesn't seem very cool at all to me. That's a lot of words to say that with crypto you can own a token that signifies you're a part of a community. And that's the coolest thing you can think of. The iPhone is much cooler than that, I use it all day. And Steve Jobs didn't talk about it nearly as much before it started being used widely.

The potential is way beyond just "proof of membership", but that's the only tool that's currently out there and in active usage, as far as I know.

When I say coordination, I mean all sorts of collective decision-making and agency can take place using crypto as a medium, if someone has a vision and enough people are invested in making it happen, see: https://otherinter.net/research/squad-wealth/. Basically, if you need to get groups of people to align themselves and act in concert, and it's happening over the internet, crypto has the potential to make that happen. The technology is fundamentally social in nature, whereas an iPhone is fundamentally a personal object that happens to include some social tooling.

I don't know how it's going to look. Maybe groups will work together to purchase and maintain land. Maybe you'll see digital guilds or unions forming around creative niches. Regen (https://www.regen.network/) is working on communities for landowners who want to get carbon credits. It's really early. Maybe nothing will happen at all, and I'll look back on these posts with embarrassment. But it's exciting to work on projects building stuff that really doesn't exist yet, if only to see what happens.

(oh, and, people really aren't talking about this side of crypto at all. this is an entirely separate thing from bitcoin and defi)

Interesting. Do you have some resources or recommended reading you can suggest for crypto in the context of social coordination or these other shifts in concept you mentioned? I don't doubt there's interesting applications for some of this tech that have nothing do with the usual hype. I would be curious to read up on some of these developments.

Bitcoin is not a scam. Your mileage may vary on other tokens.

I'm extremely skeptical that this silent majority exists because I don't see crypto being used for anything other than hodl-ing. Do you have indicators you can point to of cryptocurrency being used as a real currency?

its only real use cases are in transferring money internationally and buying drugs off the darknet

Some big yacht dealers take BTC as well.

It’s not particularly great for that, either. Every transaction is traceable and publicly visible.

Whether or not you think NFTs are stupid and totally worthless, there's a fairly extensive economy based around fine art NFTs where collectors (who view them more as consumption goods than investments) buy and sell in ETH. And despite wild fluctuations in ETH<>USD, people's mental accounting is generally denominated in ETH.

I'm unconvinced that most people who buy NFTs are doing it for non-gambling reasons. Where's the market in smart displays you can hook up to your wallet and show you your NFTs? Other than Twitter hexagons, are people doing anything with their NFTs?

I have seen very few people talking about the price of something in ETH without a parenthetical giving the current USD value.

As I said, I'm not trying to convince you that they aren't stupid and worthless here -- just that there's a flourishing and highly functioning ecosystem built around them, which couldn't really exist in any other context.

Also, there are plenty of smart display companies popping up. Check out Infinite Objects or Atomic Forms.

> projects they believe in

really curious whether what they believe is anything other than “I’ll cash out before it tanks.”

This is a great point: even above speculation, a core part of cryptocurrency's "stickiness" is that it's effectively unregulated gambling with extremely large upsides.

I think that points to the best recourse we have, after the next crash: it needs to be regulated into the dirt.

Luckily for the world, regulators tend to step in right after collapses. Crypto is finally large enough to have the eye of regulators, and if a real collapse materializes this time - they may pounce.

I suspect they'll aggressively take out stablecoins. They are the only real source of liquidity in crypto. Price action follows liquidity, so hopefully, any future swings will be much much smaller.

Regulate a useful technology into the dirt because you have incorrect assumptions, and are generally ignorant about it?

I can assure you that, to my vague displeasure, I am somewhat of the opposite of "generally ignorant" of cryptocurrencies. And I haven't stated any assumptions, other than the relatively bland claim that "people gamble with it."

More to the point, consumer protection in the form of regulation is what makes a currency and banking system real. There's far too much risk for the average person to consider using cryptocurrency the way they currently use EUR or USD without such a regime.

It seems rash to wish for regulation to be weaponized to the effect of banning something, rather the actual meaning of regulation to define and enforce orderly, fair, predictable functioning of something.

Replace crypto with dumping toxic waste into the local river and re-read your sentence.

I think it would be more standard to replace "regulate" with "outlaw" as well, does that make sense?

You can’t just replace nouns and keep the same meaning, cos language doesn’t work that way.

It does if the analogy holds. Both have no positive attributes, only negative attributes.

Much like a puppy-kicking machine, the "orderly, fair, predictable" functioning of cryptocurrencies is something much closer to "nonexistence" than to the current state of affairs.

Less facetiously: there is nothing orderly about our current schemes. There is nothing particularly fair about them either, unless your definition of fairness is something closer to Thucydides' than a modern one. And predictable? Cryptocurrencies handily defeat our stock market in unpredictability. Not a great set of qualifications.

If you believe those things, you should be asking for crypto to be outlawed, not disingenuously regulated for the underhanded purpos of outlawing it.

You do understand that banning something is a form of regulation, correct? I don't know how much more explicit I can be with a phrase like "regulate into the dirt."

Normally if the policy outcome you wish for is for X to be non-existent, then it would be more precise and explicit to say "we should ban X". The word regulate implies to some degree that we want X to exist, just in a way that is more constrained for better outcomes. Think about the mechanical meaning of the word regulate. To try to ban something under the guise of regulation makes it seem like you are wishing for a bad-faith effort to use regulation to make something fail rather than function.

I think I've been very precise. But if it isn't to your liking, here's another formulation: I believe that cryptocurrencies should be banned.

But then again, what if what I mean by ban is a "partial ban." Opportunities for misinterpretation abound!

It is not misinterpretation, and the precision matters. For example, discourse on abortion that is favorable to abortion rights would not talk about the opposition "regulating" abortion, but only in terms of banning it. With crypto, it is clearly not politically favorable to have a complete ban, so to get an effective ban under the guise of regulation is basically hoping for authority to act in bad faith.

> I don't know how much more explicit I can be with a phrase like "regulate into the dirt."

"regulate it into the dirt" is commonly understood to mean the very real practice of placing so many restrictions/conditions on something that it becomes impractical to operate within the industry of whatever "it" is while explicitly not actually banning it outright.

I tend to agree that there's no reason it should exist, but I'm open to the idea that maybe there's a worthy purpose out there that I'm missing.

I think it CAN come to an end. The backbone of crypto and the blockchain is the willingness to maintain it which has a cost. The reason why this maintenance is cost effective is because the major holders are few and at a < 1/2 of the entire base. As long as the "right" people are winning, there will be enough justification to keep the ball rolling. If there will come a day, in which the ammount of holders become so dilluted that there stops being any clear (lets say) influencers at the top, then the "cool boy's club" will be no more. This is when exchanges will no longer have any skin in the game. Massive runs and "outages" until a few weird naive dreamers are left at the helm of the sinking ship.

I, unfortunately, agree with this. Different generations of digital assets will continuously be used to grift certain demographics, with the potential for even larger bubbles and busts in the future.

> Logic is not the driver of people's behavior.

I think people are more rational than you give them credit, but, yes, emotion often informs and overrides our logic. Feelings, emotional intuition, biases, and prejudices color the lens of the eyes through which we see the world. Logic can be like prescription glasses or like Stevie Wonder glasses depending on how we check our priors.

> The reason is because it's very closely related to gambling and triggers the same obsessive thinking as gambling does - based on my observations of how I felt and thought when I did some crypto investing.

I noticed the same obsessive feeling and learned more about myself through that day trading. It was an expensive lesson however.

this is true.

I was also flooded with some really obvious bullshit... this crash is going to sweep the table clean. There is a chance it might come back cleaner and stronger than before. More mainstream maybe, with some regulation.

Crypto shills have always just sat in the background out of mind for a while before they come out with their next rebrand of the same scam. NFTs and Web3 have had their moment and likely collected a fortune, now they have to come up with the next branding. For some reason the general public doesn't learn.

The most amusing part is how the general public instinctively reacted to NFTs as thinking they were a scam, but they had so much news coverage and big numbers behind them that it became an Emperor has no clothes situation where it can't be a scam because too many people are agreeing with it. Only for it all to unravel and the public opinion returning to its just a scam.

> For some reason the general public doesn't learn.

The type of person who tries their hand at cryptocurrency speculation isn't much interested in learning or responsible investment. They are trying to get rich, thinking they will get ahead of the rest of the FOMO idiots. Most don't have the financial resources to consider low-return "safe" investments in mutual funds or the stock market, but they can buy a few *coins for a little bit of nothing and hope it goes up. The crypto-libertarians who see it as a solution to perceived problems with fiat currencies and/or government economic power doesn't seem to have much overlap with the "get rich quick" group.

Crypto shills have the problem that this is now in the money-losing phase. This is when people start complaining to enforcement agencies. Then prosecutors, the SEC, and courts start doing their thing.

The SEC just doubled their "cyber" enforcement staff. They're still working down the backlog from the ICO boom of 2018-2019, at the rate of about two scams per month.

I expect the hammer to come down on a number of Metaverse schemes which collected money, promised a fancy 3D virtual world, and failed to ship. That's where an unregistered public offering becomes fraud.

> Crypto had a big crash only recently - about 12 to 18 months ago I think, when Elon Musk made some comments that crashed the market. That crash was rapidly forgotten and people piled back in. Same thing will happen here.

Except 12-18 months ago we weren't entering into a recession. So, although I am generally bullish on crypto, I am not so optimistic on things coming back to normal any time soon.

Remember the old adage folks - "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".

Only thing that revived crypto was all the free biden-bucks they printed. Free cash needs somewhere to go.

Not for nothing, but the majority of stimulus money was dispensed using checks with "Donald J Trump" written on them.