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> The worst thing is the human talent and energy resources wasted on crypto. Imagine if the billions were invested in useful products and services

You mean like Twitter, Meta, and TikTok? Even though 99% of crypto is scams, I prefer people working on figuring out a better financial system than figuring out more ways to steal human attention and get people addicted to ads. Probably crypto will crash and burn and not succeed, but I'd rather take that chance instead of building better addiction engines for our children.

Just look at the top SV companies. Do you really believe they are such a positive to humanity?

I think Sturgeo's law applies here.

The problem with crypto scams is that they don't usually require some novel engineering work, but rather con artistry on top of well-known, open cryptocurrency technologies.

> a16z is in on the scam.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

I think this is an unsupported claim, that also happens to be factually false.

I think "You should invest in make-believe internet money because it'll moon" is the extraordinary claim that needs to be supported. Cryptocurrency is rife with scams and scammers and even proponents would likely agree that the vast majority of all cryptocurrencies are transparent scams.

People who are anti-crypto are expressing the privilege that comes when you assume transactions you want to do will never be illegal. Crypto and trustless systems like DeFi are essential technologies to help in protecting the freedom to transact in the face of authoritarian regimes or other similar threats.

Absolutely agreed. However, the parent comment is still not wrong.

Crypto _has_ legit use cases (like you mentioned) and I hope it stays. But those use cases will never justify billions of dollars and this much resource, talent and energy poured to it (Usually to the benefit of a few, while costing clueless people their money)

Crypto could've been Bitcoin/Eth with a much smaller valuation and a healthy community and I'm sure most "anti crypto" people would've not been "anti crypto". It didn't have to be this big to have people against it. It could've been a technology we use like Venmo or IMAP. Something that solves some use cases.

I think this is a fair perspective but it does ignore the fact that if/when you have Internet money that works, it inductively leads to many additional consequences that inevitably will be attempted, such as building a parallel financial system on top of it. I think these are all in-flight and do tie back to the original thesis, but time will tell what sticks. I will say FTX is largely unrelated to the tech track of crypto, it’s just an example of an unregulated bank gambling with customer funds. Centralized exchanges for crypto certainly should be subject to the same regulatory regime as banks, especially as people begin to hold more and more crypto in their portfolios.

> those use cases will never justify billions of dollars and this much resource, talent and energy poured to it

I don't remember the source tweet anymore, but a lot of the interest in crypto from software engineers comes from the belief that most challenges that can be solved with technology have become political problems, and that there's a "why even bother?" mentality because the bureaucrats have made it unappealing to press forward.

A vast amount of money and effort goes into creating products that are only accessible to people in the US. I’d say the rest of the world is due a more than a few billion dollars worth of investment into financial infrastructure.

Not disputing that there’s a lot of scams and shady operators, but that kind of goes with the territory of subversive technology.

Is anyone operating under authoritarian regimes easier with blockchain now?

Compared or cash or anything else?

This seems like a scenario where there are other issues and blockchain isn’t really solving anything for you…

And if you get caught it’s all on the chain..

Criminals extensively using crypto proves that it is the case - under authoritarian regimes criminals are acting with virtue. Obviously things like Tornado Cash facilitate ways to obfuscate chain state, but further things like ZKPs will continue to bolster the role of crypto for transacting globally with low relative risk when under surveillance or police states.

If you need to leave your country quickly, perhaps because you are being conscripted into a war that you don’t want to die in, are you going to pack your bag full of cash on your way out? It will be confiscated.

You going to pay the border guard off with something that gets recorded on a ledger?

Are people actually doing this? Finding it easier to flee with crypto?

> And if you get caught it’s all on the chain..

I'd imagine in those circumstances, once you are caught you are in trouble regardless of the medium of exchange once the authorities note you are doing something. Up to that point, something like Monero [0] probably mitigates the risk, they have some insanely good obfuscation happening to make it hard to figure out who is trading with whom.

[0] https://www.getmonero.org/resources/about/

You could get caught because the other guy you paid got caught.

That'd probably happen with cash too though, it my thinking.

This reminds me of the rhetoric used by people who think TOR is a vital tool for valiant and heroic freedom fighters in the clutching claws of despotic dictators.

When in reality it's only used to purchase benzos and child pornography and its use it easily detectable by authoritarian regimes that control the nation's internet infrastructure.

Any authoritarian regime that will ban transactions will also ban crypto.

Detecting its use is as easy as detecting TOR usage.

The world is not split into black and white, good democracies and bad repressive countries. Most countries are a shade of gray.

For instance, my country (UK) is not usually included in lists of authoritarian countries, but still all internet activity is logged and available to the authorities. Even for minor administrative disputes.

Tor is a useful tech and bad users, no matter their number, do not diminish that.

Venezuela didn’t ban crypto.

Why talk in absolutes? “Nobody wants to be their own bank” wrong, I prefer to be my own bank. Secondly, a deed is exactly what could go on the blockchain.

A deed is just a fancy hyperlink to property. Unless you register it with the same entity that is in a position to enforce it, you're in the same dubious position as the owner of an NFT. Owning a pointer to something is useless without some off-chain mechanism to enforce the link, and once you start positing off-chain trusted parties to enforce your rights, the whole exercise gets a bit silly.

The funny thing is that every Silicon Valley shill has should have sufficient understanding of how this works to come to the same conclusion, but there are legions, LEGIONs, of technologically illiterate people who are easily fooled by these sort of bullshit usecases

That's right. I don't claim to be the smartest. But I've seen a lot of Silicon Valley businesses and technology to know that a decentralized Uber will never work. But there are enough suckers in the rest of the world to buy into BS token projects like decentralized Uber/AirBnB.

It’s terrifying how many people lack an understanding of what a state entails. For anyone reading and wondering, a state (not to be confused with a government) is defined as a monopoly on violence. It’s literally that simple, but the repercussions are immense.

A claimed monopoly on violence. And I know everything else flows on from that, but that’s still a very narrow definition of a state.

It is not narrow. It is the realist definition of the word and the most common definition throughout history. Some phrase it differently but the meaning is the same.

Well these days the definition commonly includes some sort of international recognition. Warlords don’t count anymore.

They do if they have a monopoly on violence. Whether or not your favorite state acknowledges another state is a different question. And of course once a state is defeated, it ceases to be a state.

Secondly, a deed is exactly what could go on the blockchain.

Go ahead. Put your house deed on the blockchain. Lose your key? Lose the ability to sell your house forever. Got hacked or phished and hacker transferred your deed? Get evicted the next day.

We have better systems in place for house deeds.

> Lose your key? Lose the ability to sell your house forever.

House deeds won't be simple NFTs, there will have to be other parties that can move the deed to handle things like foreclosures and eminent domain. So if your hardware wallet burns down in the neighborhood wildfire you just get the county clerk to move it for you, much like if the physical deed burned in the same fire.

And title fraud is already a thing without DLTs, just listen to all the identity theft surveillance pitches.

House deeds won't be simple NFTs, there will have to be other parties that can move the deed to handle things like foreclosures and eminent domain. So if your hardware wallet burns down in the neighborhood wildfire you just get the county clerk to move it for you, much like if the physical deed burned in the same fire.

So why the heck would you bother putting your house on a blockchain if you still need the county clerk and other entities?

What was the point of the blockchain if I have to … trust the county clerk? Why are they involved? Heck, why is there a “clerk” at all? Isn’t the point to have a trust less, decentralized system?

Since you need a centralized trusted party to enforce the property right, you might as well register the deed with them and save a lot of pointless steps. There's no such thing as decentralized, trustless ownership of tangible property.

I think we are arguing the same point, as I vehemently agree. My questions were rhetorical.

If we have other parties who can act outside the blockchain… isn’t that what we have now?

Why use the blockchain at all then?

Keep in mind that bitcoin was almost literally invented yesterday. It’s going go be around for a long, long time. In the scope of a thousand years, do you grow more certain about your words or less? History shows that what people believed even 200 years ago was often mistaken.

I don’t have a stake in the game either way (learned my lesson after gox), but being able to hoard your own digital gold all by yourself is genuinely new, and is at least one valuable use case. We’ll see if there are more, but it seems too early to tell.

Immutable, decentralized ledgers are useful for things (oh, hey CT logs, how do you do?).

Immutable decentralized ledgers are not useful for legal constructs like ownership, since in the current (and foreseeable) legal construct of property ownership is held by centralized records for which the state is the arbiter. This arbitration happens through either registries (for example, automobile, real estate, business ownership, etc), or through the courts. In order for blockchain technology to replace this legal construct in a meaningful way, there would need to a mechanism for a central authority to provide clear arbitration and resolution.

If the state can't meaningfully and authoritatively reassign those ownership rights through a legal process, then blockchain is simply a non-authoritative ledger, at which point it's existence is marginally useful since it is expensive, technically challenging to operate, and fraught with risk due to potential abuse cases from implementation errors.

This is one simple example, and doesn't dig into the fact that implementing laws as code is also problematic in countries where those laws can be rewritten by elected officials and courts.

Blockchain and bitcoin might become more useful in the future, but so far almost all blockchain uses that have gained traction have done so by grifters and the remora like folks who have attached to the bellies of the blockchain industry to enrich themselves while throwing around terms like legacy finance until their employers implode.

That’s the point, though. We can’t foresee the changes that can come from blockchain. Yes, right now it’s filled with scams. But we’re what, 14 years in? That’s the lifetime of a teenager. It’s way too early to know whether that teenager might think of a new use case, let alone the rest of history.

Investing in the ecosystem makes sense from a theoretical point of view. Personally I wouldn’t, but that’s due to personal preference rather than some fundamental disagreement with the tech vs society. Condemning others for investing at all always struck me as odd.

Fourteen years after Tim Berners Lee released his www app was, let’s call it 2005ish.

I’d say the impact of http on the world was pretty damn life changing by 2005. Linux? Fourteen years after it was released it had entirely disrupted not just the commercial Unix world but was on its way to becoming the most widely deployed operating system on the planet.

Bitcoin? Eh. I suppose ransomware authors would still be using green dot to try and collect their take if it hadn’t shown up. YouTube creators would have a harder time financing their passion without the sweet cash infusion from random vc backed crypto currency exchanges. Many quadrillion hashes would have sadly been skipped in the small chance they would have resulted in the correct number of leading zeroes.

We're how many thousand years in to having gold and honestly nobody has figured out a practical use for it - it ranges from put it in a vault to show off how spangly it is. Still big money in digging it up, despite the utility of glitter and yellow paint.

It is clear at this point there is a multi-billion dollar market for cryptocurrencies that isn't going away (I choose my words carefully, I don't like the long term prospects of any particular token). Wild success and a use case has been demonstrated already, even if a lot of people don't like the idea that burning energy is its own reward. The world has changed substantially because of it.

Well, to start, 10% of gold production goes to the electronics industry. Therefore, one could say that gold was used to manufacture products we use to serve and view the very site on which we are discussing this topic.

I agree, the world has changed substantially because of cryptocurrencies. The amount of breathless hype has reached critical levels. As for use case, well, I hear that ransomware is now a multi billion dollar industry. Congratulations?

How many millennia did it take between gold being a big deal and the development of electronics? Two? If bitcoin finds a practical use in the next century it'll be far speedier.

It was truly the store of value before people invented paper money and later digital bank accounts. That was the killer practical purpose for gold, silver, etc. - it was concentrated value that you could easily split, transport (compared to other options) and store. So it was serving a very practical purpose for millenia as you say, and there really were no options or alternatives that came close to it at the time. Historically it retained some of that allure, but now who cares? Now it seems to be a cute historical artifact of its past very tangible purpose in society.

Fast forward to today, cryptocurrencies are just a twist on the existing financial system, which already has plenty of options for store of value, electronic trading, other things we have today in our networked world. You can argue how much of an improvement it brings (I think not much), but it is 100% not the killer value store that precious metals used to be in their heyday (when they had no alternatives).

You are talking as if the progress had not been speeding up exponentially... Bitcoin is ancient at this point.

A deed is a piece of paper, plus big guys with big guns who enforce what the paper says. The paper is the least important part of the equation.

> a deed is exactly what could go on the blockchain

It's annoying when people throw non-obvious things in your face as absolute truths. Can you please explain why? Like, why, why, what kind of tangible benefit at all does putting a deed on the blockchain bring?