Seems kind of like a waste either way. Crypto was sort of neat years ago, but it hasn't amounted to anything useful
Seriously, online drug marketplaces have become massive and highly lucrative. Estimates vary anywhere between $700 million to over $1 billion each year.
Cryptocurrencies have also become useful asset stores for the wealthy living in authoritarian countries. So much so, that an estimated floor of $3-4 bil of cryptocurrency assets during the peak was just that.
I used to joke: if someone says they’re into crypto currencies, they’re either a tool or have good ketamine. Years later, that rule still shakes out.
That's my theory, please no bully!
Crypto is just software. There's no need to deploy infrastructure. Bitcoin is old enough to be in high school. Soon it'll be old enough to be in college. At some point we have to accept that it's not fit for purpose, do we not? It can't just be BBS-ing forever.
Compare other things that came out in 2007/8. The iPhone and Android, for instance. In spite of actually needing to build and deploy both hardware and software, everyone on earth has one. Billions and billions deployed.
I challenge you to find a way to falsify your thesis.
This argument relies on the assumption that Bitcoin's age is a proper marker for the entire industry, whereas most of its development only finally kicked off during the ICO mania.
It also relies on the assumption that Bitcoin's decisions reflect the entire industry's decisions, which by proof of contradiction (via anti-BCH-BTCers), does not exist: Many parts of the system are off doing their own part of the whole.
> Compare other things that came out in 2007/8. The iPhone and Android, for instance. In spite of actually needing to build and deploy both hardware and software, everyone on earth has one. Billions and billions deployed.
Apple is a centralized company that can dictate what its products will look like & can standardize their product evolutions to take future developments into account via executive/managerial leadership. Even if all of the decisions were made by the designers/devs, no one from outside the company can have a say about the hardware parts of the product, with only a relatively small part of the software side being accessible to 3rd party developers: Said developers can't access the core internals of iOS without working for Apple.
In contrast, BTC started out with relatively little leadership: While Satoshi was part of Bitcoin's early development, his control over the network was still contingent on other participants within the same network agreeing to the changes -- Disagreements are where the Bitcoin block size wars & subsequent forks emerged. At any time, a developer can modify the core parts of the codebase without restrictions, with the main limiting factor being getting other people to use that modified code instead.
IMO, are more apt comparison would be to compare it with other protocols like Bittorrent and IPFS, whose development nature is not fully controlled by a select group of people, and where everyone can modify the internals of the software to their desires. Similar to Bitcoin, however, adoption of the modified software is dependent on the modifier convincing others to use their code instead.
A better comparison would be on the protocol level like Bittorrent, IPFS, etc.
Ethereum would not take the same time as arpanet because we already have a mature arpanet.
Compare it to companies like PayPal that have really shown viability after only a few years and by 7 years were very mature.
Lots of things take a long time and never become useful. One thing (the internet) took a longish time to become really useful.
One major difference here is that the grand vision for the internet stood to help governments in many ways, whereas cryptocurrency stands to weaken governments in many ways. Currency controls enables nation to try to tune their own local economies, control international trade rates, go infinitely far into debt, and can also work as a great weapon against enemy nations. Widescale cryptocurrency adoption would stand to shatter all of this, and that's something no major government is going to just idly allow to happen.
I would also add that in the zeitgeist of the world today, the internet would likely have taken far longer to materialize than it did in the past, for reasons analogous to those with crypto. Can you imagine the US's response to digitally interlinking with China or Russia? For that matter China or Russia's view on the same. We live in a brave new world where each nation wants to strictly control their messaging while limiting, or eliminating, outside views. The internet works to undermine all of that.
You need third parties to cash in and cash out, so no.
> Can you imagine the US's response to digitally interlinking with China or Russia?
Before the internet we had the phone network, and before that the mail. Both of those are more interlinked and more open than the internet is today.
Email was what got people to sign up for dial-up internet in the first place. Prior to that, you'd have to schlep over to a copy shop to fax things over. Only businesses could afford the cost of a fax line.
The fallacy is in thinking that Web3 needs to achieve a critical mass of users that the WWW did. That's incorrect. Consumers adopted email, not WWW. That was just something that took off after the core adoption already happened. Same way Instagram took off after enough people bought camera-enabled smartphones.
> Cryptocurrencies have also become useful asset stores for the wealthy living in authoritarian countries.
Again certainly not BTC. Any one of those stories over the last few months of people using Bitcoin as a currency of last resort are so sad because they all got rekt. Had they bought USDC or a hypothetical future CBDC or e-cash, they would be so much better off.
There's that story about the Ukrainian refugee who put his last $2000 worth into BTC when he fled the Russians. That's worth like $900 now.
That’s a rounding error to the half a trillion dollar global drug trade [1].
It’s still a billion dollars and it has been steadily growing every year.
And now a third option: a late adopter who is looking at large losses.
Cryptocurrencies have also become useful asset stores for the wealthy living in authoritarian countries. So much so, that an estimated floor of $3-4 bil of cryptocurrency assets during the peak was just that.
Based on what? And this is still tiny relative to $2.5 trillion market size. Billionaires have no use for Bitcoin to hide wealth. Bitcoin does not bypass the financial system since you still have to convert fiat to btc or btc back to fiat.
Could've fooled me. I'm a "power user" of the international financial system and bitcoin has saved my ass multiple times, from debit cards not working internationally to needing to move moderate quantities of money (tens of k$) faster than legacy banks could. Please keep in mind the distinction between "not useful" and "not useful to you personally".
In that sense it worked splendidly as designed.