Most Crypto Developers Aren't Working on Bitcoin or Ethereum
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I'm not saying there aren't good new ideas in new alt-coins/etc. I'm just saying if we're making a big deal about the number of devs, the above is the main factor.
I think that most cryptocurrencies are intentional scams, and the vast majority of the remainder are bad ideas, but there are literally thousands of cryptocurrencies released each year at this point. Out of that cesspool, I'd expect to see maybe 1 or 2 successful ideas a year. Note I didn't say "good", I said "successful"--in general I think cryptocurrencies are bad for society, but lots of things that are bad for society are successful.
This past year, I think Avalanche Consensus and Near's Deep Sharding were pretty decent ideas. I don't know if they're good enough to translate into long-term success for either coin, but I suspect in the long run, deep sharding drawing inspiration from Near will end up in Ethereum.
An idea which has been hinted at, which I think would be an improvement, would be an ecosystem which isn't programmable, but pulls successful ideas from programmable ecosystems. A few L1 chains at this point have added integrated oracles, but I don't think that takes the idea far enough. A chain with integrated UniSwap, integrated Aave, etc., and no way to add your own coins without consensus from validators, would have no scams and be more performant, while keeping the value of those products in the coin itself. It would be harder to build hype for, because you can't have a gold rush of developers coming in to build the same old coins and investors to try to get in early, but in the long run it seems more sustainable.
I believe that's literally not true.
I think it's thousands.
I'll say it, though.
What do all these coins do that's special except attempt to make money for the relevant company? What problem does alt-coin #45321 solve?
- avoiding unnecessary complexity
- avoiding early miner advantage
- avoiding any financial rewards for its creators
- improving privacy and scalability
Crypto fees are too high, though. The average ETH transaction is, I think, ~$6. That means it's uneconomical in the vast majority of cases.
Of course, everyone who uses it knows this, which makes for an odd scam, don't you think?
No, there aren't.
> I use it to pay for services or donate money all the time
I can do this with Pix, UPI, Wise, Apple Pay, MPesa, etc.
What is crypto doing that is so special other than complete gambling and speculation?
I'm really sorry if this offends you but I think your opinions on tech and what constitutes a crime are really narrow. Perhaps you should check your financial privilege?
Okay, but the Nepal client still has to remit payment/receive payment with some source in their traditional payment system, so this doesn't really solve the issue unless they decide to operate all in USDC.
It's not a terrible burden coming from the US, but you've likewise offloaded the problem of having a US bank account onto me, where I now have to transfer my USD into USDC to pay you. It's not hard because I already have a Coinbase account, but it would take a few days for added funds to be released so I can send them to you. It's certainly not easier than something like Zelle.
Ultimately, nations aren't going to give up control of their money systems: China, for example, might use blockchains for a digital Yuan, but you can bet they will be holding the validator keys. Problems bridging between blockchains are as bad, if not worse, than problems bridging between traditional financial systems.
Point is, you're seeing a localized benefit from USDC because you've offloaded the problem of bridging between systems onto your clients, but that doesn't fundamentally fix that there are bridging problems. And even if every system moves onto blockchains in the future, that won't solve those bridging problems--in fact, it will almost certainly make them worse in the short run.
Neither of our anecdotes cancel the other out. People can value different things, and that's ok! I'm amazed people spend their time telling others what they should and shouldn't value. I don't watch football and it has no value to me, but I don't go around telling people they should stop watching it too. If humanity were less self-centered and more empathetic, we'd approach everything this way, including football, ads, and crypto.
Yeah... advertisers. ;)
Cryptocurrencies are pretty bad, but at least if you ignore them, they don't find you and directly harm you.
But you can’t ignore its effects, such as the environmental impact. If cryptocurrencies had zero effect on the people who don’t use them, there wouldn’t be such a large opposition.
In small European stock exchanges without HFT actors, buy/sell spreads on individual stocks can get large and daily volume very small, so you need to do more planning around any trade that's larger than "retail nickles". This is not great for attracting investors to these stocks, even if the companies are worthy.
But in crypto, there's no underlying value. There are no worthy companies who deserve more investor attention, no tokens that should be in anyone's long-term portfolio for any reason but FOMO. It's a 24/7 nothingburger outlet.
That's not really true. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, and speculation may be driving most of price, but these are real tech products. Ethereum, Cardano, Avalanche, Solana are decentralized computing platforms, with utility. Uniswap, Aave are exchange platforms, that allow people to swap currency real time.
They may not be VMWare, Rackspace, JPMorgan Western Union or Moneygram, but they are real companies, with real products, that offer real services.
As of 2021, Allianz, Deutsche Telekom, Intel and Cisco are four stocks where investors that bought at the Dotcom Bubble peak never broke even. Maybe Ethereum, Cardano, Avalanche, Solana are far above their actual potential value, but it doesnt mean they are worth 0.
https://www.coingecko.com/en/categories/smart-contract-platf... https://www.coingecko.com/en/categories/decentralized-financ...
That is still speculation and most of the existing financial system can do payments (the supposed original use case) already.
Take a look at UPI, Pix, etc. A safer, faster and better future of payments is already being built and used to the tune of hundreds of millions of real people. And it is not a complete pyramid scheme.
That cannot be said for crypto, nobody is using it for anything other than speculation, crime and ransomware.
As someone else has correctly mentioned, ads (and tracking), are sadly the lifeblood of a lot of tech action and are arguably just as (if not more) exploitative. It's just slower and more subtle.
As for crypto itself, I get why it's not an attractive idea, and yes -- a very good bit of it is scam-city, but I'm compelled to admit that the cryptobros are generally correct when they describe the state of the dollar today -- even if their proposed solutions often leave much to be desired.
Bitcoin is like git basically, it works, most of the crypto fans are happy with it. Non tech people are using nice UIs without any understanding what happens to their money.
OTOH I have friends that work "around crypto", they either work on new coins that provide privacy/speed/eco-friendliness or create exchanges or create other financial stuff like crypto robo-advisors that buy/sell according to user spec algo. The scene looks similar to what hedge funds are doing on major stock exchanges.
https://twitter.com/portalpayments/status/162228646713646285...
Solana transaction fees are fractions of a cent as you can see.
Portal, which my cofounder snd I wrote, supports Solana’s transaction priority fees (which still costs less than a cent), which gets transactions into blocks faster, so less than a second as you saw in the video.
The transaction fees are based on compute rather than amount which you probably know, so it could have been a million USDC and the price would be flat.
USDC is considered the best capitalised stablecoin and Portal defaults to it (or EUROC in future) because we care about payments more than speculation.
In all seriousness, USDC comes pretty close to that i think or something built on algorand
[1] https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
Most HTML developers wrote gaudy sites <blink> and <marquee> tags. But the Web went on to create trillions in wealth for the world because it was based around an open protocol, HTTP.
Most PHP developers wrote insecure garbage code, but back then businesses wanted to just have a site that works. It had some utility. But Web 2.0 went on to create even more utility for the world, even though its network effects increasingly created monopolies.
Ethereum really democratized the ability to launch a token. So that’s what the vast majority of people did. Eventually there will be real applications worldwide, and what’s more, they will be produced by factories (like UniSwap) so they’ll just be a very reliable way to distribute open source software. People don’t appreciate that smart contracts can do a LOT more than that!
https://intercoin.org/applications are examples of open source smart contracts designed to service communities, and you don’t need a token to use them. There is no ponzi, only utility. Just use them in your community — or not.
However, the last 3 years during the bull market speculators found Intercoin very uninteresting, because by contrast a tulip mania could make a lot more returns, than selling actual products to communities.
What do cryptocurrencies do again?
It only becomes important once the community grows enough to start securing something valuable. Like for example a marketplace that connects online students and teachers may be holding $20M in credits and you are trusting every employee to not misappropriate these credits. With Web3, the marketplace is just a Web2 interface that sets up the transactions, but at the end each user signs them with their own private keys, so the marketplace site has no liability nor presents a risk to the participants. Its commissions, like all other business logic, is immutable on the blockchain.
Elections - you can make sure that no one can just go in the database and change all the votes, as they can with Stackoverflow moderator elections for example.
Contests
Escrow payments
Auctions
Recurring subscriptions
You can combine them, for example you can make videoconferencing slots on your calendar which people around the world can book, to do office hours with you or take your course. People would bid on the slots and you’d take the top 10 people.
Crypto takes care of all this and around the world. It is like if you asked “what does the Web do, since we have newspapers, magazines, radio, TV”? The answer is that it standardized communication on an open protocol called HTTP. So it allowed anyone to publish information for anyone else in the world to access.
Smart contracts also represent a rebellion against having to trust institutions and governments. Now we have an alternative. The Web 1.0 democratized access to information, Web 2.0 allowed people to communicate and collaborate (but sadly didn’t democratize it) and Web 3.0 is radically open source and allows people to exchange value and participate in programs that don’t require trusting middlemen. The more complex the application, the more you as a network win by trusting the blockchain and smart contracts alone.
Start by clicking the link above if you want to get more examples of applications. Cryptocurrency by itself is just a first generation toy like space invaders or personal home pages. The space will evolve, and you can bury your head in the sand or you can spend 3 mins to click a link.
Here are some more applications that increase donor and investor confidence and break down global barriers:
https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees/
https://community.intercoin.app/t/how-intercoin-helps-to-rai...
All of the examples you list require external trust outside the blockchain, making its use moot.
(Perhaps recurring subscriptions could be done without external trust, but I don’t think it helps the domain much.)
What makes you think I haven’t researched the oracle problem and hundreds of other things related to this space? Vitalik writes about tons of things in crypto, and so do I. I have been building solutions for years.
They are FREE. If you don’t like them, don’t use them. If you don’t have time to even read a summary digest of what they do, please don’t patronize others. I don’t have time to read about how GPT transformers work in detail, and you won’t find me condescendingly telling people to please read up on the AI alignment problem. And certainly not knee-jerk dismissing and downvoting EVERYTHING related to AI without even spending a minute reading answers to mu own questions !
I recently left a company that pivoted hard to building blockchain infrastructure because I couldn't find any way I could ever recommend my friends or family interact with the services the company was building. A lot of people are holding out for technical vaporware to solve these problems. I can't hold out anymore.
But you’d be wrong. First of all, each participant can control a small portion of the overall value (eg one vote in an election, or one student paying one teacher). Even if their keys are hacked, the real value is for the network itself to be secured. And the business logic to be followed no matter what! No corruption of the database, ever!
For example, UniSwap is a smart contract factory and you trust every instance that comes out of it to be an battle tested and heavily audited piece of code you can trust. As of right now we are forced to trust the value and control of YOUR ENTIRE NETWORK to a big tech company that has all the infrastructure. That’s the best we have today, like how we trusted the Post Office to deliver mail and not tamper with it, until SMTP got adopted over the Internet.
For more info, click here: https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...
Different people have different threat models.
Sure different people have different threat models. Perhaps some classes of users don’t have good solutions, but we are building apps for the mainstream.
It is distributed application hosting.
There's not much enlightenment to be had on this topic, so not much productivity.
And yes, all of crypto is a scam. There are no exceptions.
Even if you try and resticker poker chips as chocolate gold coins and sell them to the public as with what all of crypto does.
I can't wait for hard regulations to completely kill these bullshit jobs in this scam industry, the layoffs are just the start.
To the people saying theres absolutely no use of cryptocurrencies, say that to people who were able to save some of their money when fleeing war torn regions. Tell that to people who whos pay-checks are getting stolen by banks. Tell that to people who are finally getting access to loans in impoverished regions. Tell that to activists banned by governments who get to fight another day. Tell that to people who’s governments devalued their currency who has basically got cut out of a way to trade.
Yes criminals use crypto! But these crimes didn’t magically appear because of crypto. Dont forget fiat has had a monopoly on these crimes before 2009.