To the surprise of literally no one with a brain.
I'm in awe of how much collective brain power has going to waste on crypto. Will we ever get these years back?
I'm in awe of how much collective brain power has going to waste on crypto. Will we ever get these years back?
The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien: “Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.”
But in reality it would be a bunch of people paid in gamified company bucks to write spammy blogs and comments to promote shitcoins that a small number of the DAO members would trade on while the rest debated if they should buy some half-assed NFT because it would support a community of creators.
Tasty food? Waste.
Fine wine? Waste.
Any car that costs more than $20k? Waste.
Blockbuster hollywood movies? Waste.
Housing that goes beyond our basic need for shelter? Waste.
The resources we've spent on crypto are, at the very least, pushing technological frontiers. And experimenting with new systems of finance that could improve on the foundations of our entire economy. Compared to all the other crap we spend money on, this is far less wasteful.
What are some projects or technologies that have been driven forward by crypto companies that are usable outside the crypto-space?
Examples:
- Circom: https://iden3.io/circom
- Cairo: https://www.cairo-lang.org/docs/
- zkREPL: https://0xparc.org/blog/zkrepl
It’s objectively the most practical car in terms of balancing mileage, longevity, cost-to-own, environmental impact, and convenience.
Although, I will admit Priuses being far north of $20k is due to temporary market conditions.
“The money we spend on crack pushes humanity’s chemical frontiers. Experimenting with new methods of producing crack could result in improvements in our public health system!”
> Tasty food. Fine wine. Car that costs more than $20k. Blockbuster hollywood movies. Housing that goes beyond our basic need for shelter.
I'd say ‘spoken like a true American’, but the mention of ‘fine wine’ gets in the way.
The best minds of a generation. Pfft.
That's how much impact crypto has had on the world in 15 years.
Would you call that a successful product?
The Internet in early 1990s was still over a decade old but had it disappeared overnight then, absolutely nothing about anyone's life would've changed back then.
Google search volume doesn't collapse if the stock market isn't doing well. You still send emails even in a recession.
No one uses crypto outside of speculation. Even the dApp with the most "mainstream" use case, OpenSea, has collapses in usage as soon as the market turns bearish. Why? Because no one wants to buy "digital art" when there is no bigger fool to sell it to.
I haven't even logged into my Metamask for weeks now.
> No one uses crypto outside of speculation.
Same old argument while closing your eyes to actual use cases. You have this technology where - leaving aside free cross-border trustless payments to anyone, you can have an immutable record of data to store, unhackable, solves spam and you actually still think this is all about speculation? You're on Hacker News, really recommend putting on your hacker hat and re-evaluating it.
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On a slightly different note, Opensea is not a true dApp and it's a little centralized in places. But yes of course NFTs right now are extremely speculative. Look elsewhere, ENS domains usage is at an all time high and rapidly growing (even after the recent price correction), Uniswap recently crossed a trillion $ in total transaction volume in its lifetime.
Blockchain tech is an extremely powerful tool, it's a shame most hackers on HN are hostile to it which makes them miss real use-cases happening under the surface.
Even ENS domain usage has been going up because of the speculative frenzy around valuable domain names (look up the race to register all 3-letter ENS names).
You can start off by naming three projects that you actually use regularly outside of speculative investments. Because for the life of me, I can't.
2) I was in Budapest and had lost my debit card and was in need for Euros - I literally looked up the closest Bitcoin ATM, which was 10 mins walk from my hotel and instantly had access to cash (global borders, international payments can be a nightmare). On a similar note - I often make payments in crypto to international contractors.
3) I regularly use Poap (https://poap.xyz/) as proof of participation in various events like hackathons / workshops, etc and this has in turn helped me in the space.
All three of these are not speculative investments.
And as I keep repeating, this is literally the start. We're builders, we can see where the space is heading and where it will be in 5 years.
He had some arguments like "I don't want to pay taxes so gov blocked my accounts, it's an unfair system" and "it's a scammy field now, but we can solve that by simply automating scam assessment".
When I talked to his superior turned out he shown himself not nearly as good a dev as my impression was, they were strapped for resources yet not sad to see him go. Makes me think it's not usually the best brain power that goes there.