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Comment by emilsedgh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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