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Comment by ricochet11 | Hacker News Reader

85% of email is spam[1], but the remaining 15% is really useful and helps run the world.

same in everything: probably 85% of songs i don't like, 10% i'll listen to, 5% is amazing.

85% of crypto is nonsense, 10% is interesting, 5% transformative.

i find it a useful mental model to not be annoyed at everything i encounter. if theres tons of people saying taylor swift is great theres probably one song im gonna like. apply it to crypto too.

[1] https://donotpay.com/learn/spam-accounts-for-approximately-p...

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The thing about crypto is that 50% of crypto is outright scams, 30% is nonsense, 15% is interesting academically but completely useless, and 5% is transformative in a very narrow particular set of circumstances that very few people actually have.

And I'm being generous.

You are describing the google app store as well.

The Google app store has spam and not spam. Crypto only has spam.

A perfunctory search shows there are over 20,000* cryptocurrencies in 2022. Saying that 3,000 (15%) are interesting|transformative is a bit of a stretch, especially given that over 19,990 of cryptocurrencies are in complete obscurity for the general public: if a coin is interesting|transformative in a forest with no one to hodl it, how interesting/transformative is it really? Sturgeon's law should probably be amended with "90% percent of Sturgeon's law examples are crud".

* "As of July 2022, there are 20,268 cryptocurrencies in existence. However, not all cryptocurrencies are active or valuable. Discounting many “dead” cryptos leaves only around 10,953 active cryptocurrencies." [1] — 15% of active cryptocurrencies in 2022 would be ~1,643, the point still stands.

[1] https://explodingtopics.com/blog/number-of-cryptocurrencies

I think those are great examples of the Pareto Principle [1]. It says 80% of the results come from 20% of the causes. Your examples could be generalized to an extension principle: 30% of the consequences come from 15% of the causes, and 50% come from a separate 5% of the causes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

They are applying Sturgeon's law [1] ("ninety-percent of everything is crud"), not Pareto, common misconception.

Pareto would be that 80% of all crypto transactions are done by 20% of all the cryptocurrencies (given 10,953 active cryptos, that would be 2,190), which also doesn't stand since ~99% of all crypto transactions are done by the top 10 cryptos (BTC, ETH, etc.), textbook oligopoly [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

[2] https://coinmarketcap.com/charts https://www.statista.com/statistics/1269302/crypto-market-sh...

There's 20'000 cryptocurrencies, and zero actual use cases outside of crimes like tax evasion, money laundering, and buying illegal things. So your percentages are a bit off, and should be more like 0.

I wouldn't even classify buying illegal drugs on the internet, which is the most moral of all cryptocurrency use cases, as "transformative".

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