[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dutch_tulip_bulb_market... [2] https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archiv...
What really scares me is that this was easily 5 years ago now. At the time I too thought "peak bubble". The extent to which this space has metastasized blows me away. Normally a scam dies when the novelty wanes and it runs out of suckers. But the cryptowhatever space has continually generated shiny new illusions for people to pump and dump. I'm now wondering if we've entered the age of the permanent floating scam, where "there's one born every minute" is enough to provide an eternal flow of suckers for an ever-shifting constellation of predators and useful idiots.
There are a lot of ways for amateurs to lose money, and many of those ways are, as here, engineered by the people eager to take advantage of amateurs.
It's nothing personal against real estate agents; half of one side of my family was in real estate. What makes you good in real estate is mainly dealing individually with people in a sales-y way, plus moderate knowledge of your local property market. It requires only 9th-grade math and no tech savvy.
Is it possible she was also a tech genius? No. Because she not only said she wasn't into technology, she also quickly demonstrated that lack of knowledge. But more importantly, she was excited about bitcoin, which even then was obviously a technology that was not good for much besides creating a zero-value, highly hypeable speculative instrument.
That's the reason why a lot of those cryptocurrencies didn't go straight to zero in the last month or so, there are just more morons "buying the dip" and expecting that new money will come and create another hockey stick (and unfortunately it will as explained above).
I think what's happening here is that there's both scams and legitimate usages. The legitimate users are having a hard time advancing because the scammers dominate the ecosystem and the scammers perpetuate because the legitimate users/developers keep using/developing. We see big companies investing in these companies. We also see scammers funding research (to help prop up the bubble and legitimize themselves).
I think this is what separates crypto from tulip mania. At the end of the day, tulips had very little actual value. On the other hand, crypto does have some value, but people are convinced the technology is much further along than it actually is and thus the bubble refuses to pop. What the actual value of crypto is is up for debate. But I think we can all agree that it is neither zero nor what the current market reflects (at least the current state of crypto).
When I compare Bitcoin's paltry real-world use versus, say, M-Pesa and Venmo, which target the same initial uses as Bitcoin, I think it's especially easy to see that the legitimate problems were long ago solved pretty well. So a decade in, I'm comfortable saying the actual value is near enough to zero that it makes no practical difference.
I agree that there are other technologies that solve a lot of the same problems cryptocurrencies serve, but I think your search criteria is wrong. You're looking for legitimate users instead of looking for legitimate usecases. Since the tech is new the only legitimate users you're going to find are fanboys and geeks. This is going to tell us very little about real world usages. If we judged a technology's use case by the number of legitimate users then we'd never invent new technologies because there are never legitimate users using technology that doesn't exist (and very few when it is new). So I don't understand your search criteria.
There are many big fin companies investigating and using different cryptocurrencies though. Whether you call these legitimate users or not is very debatable though.
> If we judged a technology's use case by the number of legitimate users then we'd never invent new technologies because there are never legitimate users using technology that doesn't exist (and very few when it is new).
This is definitely not true. Take the internet as an example. From its earliest days it was practical for its initial users. Then there was a long virtuous cycle of increasing capability and increasing users. Along the way, many of the new technologies had plenty of plausible initial users. E.g., look at the initial proposal for the WWW: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Proposal.html
You might also read "Crossing the Chasm", which describes the typical tech adoption lifecycle, who early users tend to be, and how one gets from there to a real success.
> I think there is real value in having digital cash. That is, a digital currency that is both private and secure. I'm thinking something along the lines of zcash though, not bitcoin.
I believe you think that. But I don't think the evidence bears you out. For most people digital cash already exists, and has since the days debit cards became popular. Bitcoin's actual use is a rounding era compared with M-Pesa's transaction volume, let alone debit and credit card use.
> There are many big fin companies investigating and using different cryptocurrencies though. Whether you call these legitimate users or not is very debatable though.
Sorry, but no, there's no real debate. It's true that many of them have investigated, because some VP saw something buzzy enough that a pilot project would give him a career advantage. But it's also true that real financial companies are actually doing very little with cryptocurrencies, and it's less over time. One could argue that's because major financial companies just don't get it. But I think the more plausible explanation is that they see a lot of risk, especially reputational risk and regulatory risk, with comparatively little offsetting reward.
I don't think exchanging money that is tracked and the data is sold is privacy preserving and akin to cash. Honestly, I feel like you didn't read my comment but just ranted because I said cryptocurrencies might have some value (after stating that the vast majority of it is scams).
I understand that for you, being able to secretly use your money has value. Setting aside the extent to which that may not make sense (money is inherently social), it's still not something most people care about. In the US, use of actual cash is declining rapidly, going from over 30% of payments to under 20% in less than a decade. In many countries, it's lower still.
I get that there are some people who have practical needs to hide their transactions. E.g., criminals. And there are some people who, as you, have an emotional or ideological desire for financial secrecy. But I don't think either group is sufficient to drive real adoption of cryptocurrency as a common payment mechanism. The former group is self-limiting; they attract police attention and regulatory scrutiny and create branding problems. And I think the latter group is too niche to matter enough to the rest of the payment market.
Maybe I'm wrong, of course, but after a decade of asking for real uses and getting back handwaving, I'm not sweating this one.
I was shocked because he said it with the same conviction as when the sun rises tomorrow.
I know a guy who owned a sizable exchange at one point in the 2010s. Today he wishes he had never stepped into the world. The real shot callers are a mix of CBOE quants and international organized crime players. The narratives exist for a reason.
0xbadc0de5 revists this classic story, with a home improvement contractor replacing the shoeshine boy.
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/BUSINESS-INSIDER-The-Mai...
Who were led to believe that crypto was legit, and a way to finally get their fare share.
Shocked no one called this a Ponzi scheme yet.
USD is still the goto choice for ponzi and scams in general, does that invalidate it's utility?
I mean, the US has got some really sharp and explodey fiat, arguably the most fiat fiat in the world. But we stopped pretending it was backed by anything else in the 70s.
USD is fiat money, built on trust sure, but in practice backed by the wealth and power of the United States.
What percentage of circulating USD is involved in that sort of activity?
Give us absolutely values...yeah nice way to deflect but doesn't hold up bud.
Deal with absolute numbers and it pales in comparison, and again it's used for scams is a null argument unless you hide it in percentages.
The argument applies to any fungible asset and isn't unique to blockchain.
Also check the history of the dollar and financial networks.. clever shitty people will always be ahead of the curve.
It's why I support regulation, people are very good at identifying bad behaviours and mitigating it..that is until they end up running it.
My argument is that the net impact of USD is positive, while the net impact of cryptocurrency is negative.
Protip: don't FOMO into anything as you will always be a bag holder.
That's about the jist of your response and has nothing to do with the utility of blockchain
The posts you are responding to never said blockchain consensus protocols don’t work. All they are saying is that hype coins tend to have the shape of a scam.
Now, if you want to get back to us just as soon as you find an application for blockchain consensus protocols that isn’t basically a hype coin, we’d be happy to hear about that.
IPFS, storj, any number of infrastructure projects/value props.
Hellium, which is a wireless access point blockchain, there are a bunch but you aren't actually interested in any of this.
> Get back to us
Dude speak for yourself only, I have no idea who you think you represent but you're wrong if you think it's anyone but yourself.
It's clear your not a genuine actor in this dialogue. Let's see you move that goal post.
Personally I haven’t even seen the goalposts in this interaction since you decided that, in a discussion of a shitcoin pump-and-dump scam, the fact that said coin is built on a solution to the Byzantine Generals problem is somehow important, and… means that people shouldn’t criticize scammers taking advantage of credulous investors to fleece them?
It does not matter if a shitcoin is built using quantum manipulation of the space time continuum, if all that is being done with it is selling it to rubes to obtain their dollars.
You can be excited about blockchain, that’s fine, and you can believe it has actual value. But when people point out that your favorite technology is actually continually being used to perpetrate scams, you should get angry with the scammers, not the people who are pointing that out.
Personally, I like JavaScript. When people shout about tracker-infested slow loading websites, I don’t respond by saying ‘you’re wrong because actually the object dictionary duality in JS is a really elegant system’. That doesn’t matter. I reserve my anger for the people who are using JavaScript for evil.
You fell for the trap and ignored the one project that meets your requirements...like I called.
You're not a genuine actor in this conversation.
And when people point out that any asset can be used, and is used to a much greater degree, you ignore it.
You are literally projecting yourself on to others.
Feel free to be Paul Krugman on this tech stack, it's not going away because of it's utility. Just because there are assholes that scam people doesn't invalidate it's use cases.. Same applies for the USD.
Anyway, GLHF!
FUD & FOMO are exactly derived from this problem.
Solving the Byzantine Generals problem doesn't help you know who to trust.
With a large enough network, it makes it extremely difficult for malicious actors to subvert the process of exchanging money.
It does nothing to solve other crucial aspects of "who do I trust with my money", such as having recourse when someone scams you into giving them money.
In fact, the technology's spread has enabled terrible abuses of trust like cryptolocker attacks, and has probably made scamming much more profitable and practical.
If the solution to those problem has even a whiff of "user error" in it, then I submit that the problem is not actually with the users (it so rarely is).
How do you prove that only the attacker doesn't also have access to a private key?
It mitigates the issue by making a 51% attack or its equivalent harder.
Outside cryptocurrencies, there is literally no practical application for even an approximate solution for the Byzantine Generals problem.
Outside cryptocurrencies, you can always use a 1970s vintage Merkle tree without the 10000x weight of the blockchain.
You are splitting hairs on the solve and it comes off as petty. Bitcoin 100% has solved it, prove me wrong by showing me how it's failed.
> Outside cryptocurrencies, there is literally no practical application for even an approximate solution for the Byzantine Generals problem
Hmmm sure
This shifts the work for your position to another person, and in the negative. Certainly it makes your life easier, but in traps you in a bubble of your own creation.
It’s essentially the same as admitting “I can’t prove it, so you have to prove the inverse” and hoping the other person will Marty McFly for you, and waste their time instead. It’s a solid method for reinforcing confirmation bias because whether they try or forget about it and move on you get to continue in your assumed position.
In the general construction of byzantine generals, there's essentially an adversarial agent preventing arbitrary communications. As far as I know, a distributed ledger can't generally survive in such an environment. Nor can TCP.
Leslie Lamport commenting on the 1982 paper. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/byzanti...
> There is a problem in distributed computing that is sometimes called the Chinese Generals Problem ... the original title of this paper was The Albanian Generals Problem ... The obviously more appropriate Byzantine generals then occurred to me.
If I've got your private key, I can do what I want with the bitcoins it has access to.