No disagreement on the charlatans, scammers, cybercrims, NK's of the world, etc, FWIW.
I see it everyday - video poker "cafes" and here in Wisconsin the cultural acceptance and actual embrace of weird things like "pull tabs" and "dice games". Las Vegas is an entire city that has been built on financial ruin.
But we can simultaneously criticize, express concern, and work towards fixing multiple issues at the same time.
I personally take a very different view, which is that voluntary transactions are inherently ethical. The questions of ethics rests not in the outcomes for me, but in the question of whether any force was initiated. I can voluntarily donate so much money to charity that I make myself insolvent - if that's my choice, it's fine. Conversely, if a mugger puts a gun to my head and demands I give all of my money to charity, that is not fine, the mugger is infringing upon my life, liberty, and property.
Outcomes are the exact same - one situation is ethical and voluntary, the other is unethical because it is involuntary.
Swindlers and charlatans are kinda a grey area, since that reaches into the realm of transactions that appear voluntary but are rooted in false premises or concealed information, and might therefore be considered unethical if not outright theft.
At the same time, if the state is responsible for providing individuals with mathematical literacy and it fails so horribly at that such that individuals voluntarily play games with a mathmatical expexted value (EV) of <$1 for every $1 they put in, which they do with the sole hope of reaping an EV of >$1, the same argument can be made about the state, who, worse than the charlatans and scammers, had the responsibility of educating their own victim well enough for the victim to not fall for such schemes.
That abdication of the responsibility paired with the exploitation of those same individuals the state has failed to responsibly educate makes the state activity feel much more reprehensible, in my opinion.
My subjective views aside, your point about being willing and able to tackle two problems at once is a perfectly valid one, and I concede even that it can be more efficient to target the lesser of two evils if the rate of evil reduction is greater due to the smaller evil being a quicker/easier fix.
As for the rest... Pretty sure I'm following but it's a bit more philosophical than what I'm capable of.
With that said, if you follow the crypto space it's a symptom rather than problem. Just like the lottery many people will outright (essentially) say "crypto is my only chance to get out of my disadvantaged economic position".
It's really quite sad and as much as I bash crypto I have a tremendous amount of empathy for people who feel trapped in their economic situation and desperately play crypto/lottery. I cringe when I see people in the crypto hate/skeptic community cheer when average crypto "users" end up in financial ruin. It's disgusting.
I've told multiple people in the space something to the effect of "If you spent as much time, energy, and resources as you do pumping crypto bullshit on education - learning to code, trades, professional certifications, etc you'd be much better off". Hell - many of the shills pumping crypto could walk into any organization and get a great sales/marketing position. Crypto is truly "MLM for men" and the stats back that up.
The statistics are horrendous and people desperately hoping for another "moon coin" to get that lambo (or whatever) is remarkably similar to playing the lottery or thinking your six year child getting to the NBA/NFL/etc is your ticket out.
I don't want to put readers asleep, but I see cryptocurrency as a very complex technology that requires a bordering-on-academic understanding of privacy, autonomy, sovereignty, macroeconomics, the shortcomings of FIAT currency, centralized banking, the federal reserve, fractional reserve banking, asymmetric cryptography, computer security, and a litany of other topics to fully appreciate and realize the benefits offered by Bitcoin, Monero, etc.
I think it's an utterly fascinating real-world study into the crossroads of monetary economics, market economics, politics, computer science & cybersecurity, human psychology that has some very real utilities, but...
I suspect (many? most? majority? plurality?) of the people involved in crypto really don't even care about any of that, let alone understand it, they're just speculating purely on the basis of greater fool theory, and many of them do get hurt.
I tend to be against government regulation, but as a pro-crypto person for the right reasons, even I don't think it would be a bad idea to kill the FIAT<->USD exchanges that let people who are dangerously uninformed participate (and get burned) in this wild west ecosystem. The sad reality that these exchanges have widespread KYC but no accredited investor requirements shows that the regulators are really only concerned about Uncle Sam's bottom line, not about protecting people.
The whole thing really ought to go back to where it was circa ~2012, even it comes at the cost of BTC going back to 2012 market cap and prices.
Cryptocurrency is rightfully many things: a cutting edge payment network, an enormous boon to financial privacy, a way to enable entirely new types of organizations and funding models in the business world, a source of rapid developments to and applications of fascinating and obscure cryptographic concepts (e.g. zero-knowledge proofs), a hedge against systemic FIAT and some geopolitical risks, a driver of needed improvements in FIAT financial infrastructure (just like Google Fi was a driver of needed improvements in consumer internet infrastructure), I could go on and on...
But one thing it should absolutely NOT be treated as is an "investment". It generates no cashflow and investing based on greater fool theory only ever causes speculative bubbles where the nominal price spectacularly diverges from the true economic value, just like in the tulip mania. Any decent financial advisor will tell you to avoid that like the plague!
Legitimate question for you because this has been a remarkably civil dialog considering this is such a flash point on HN (I appreciate that):
If it really is all of these things, where is the user adoption? Every six months or so I undertake the following exercise:
1) Get the 10 most active chains (variety of sources for this). Always includes bitcoin, eth, a bunch of l2s/sidechains/etc.
2) Visit their respective block explorers.
3) To the extent the data is available, capture daily and monthly metrics for the following: number of total transactions, used unique addresses, and (ideally) unique TX/RX transaction pairs.
4) Add them all up (rounded up).
5) Assume each address is a distinct user (they aren't).
6) Assume each address on each chain is a distinct user (they aren't).
Every time I undergo this exercise I come to the same conclusion: based on actual network stats the number of blockchain users is incredibly low - even when strongly favoring crypto with the methodology above the DAU/MAU metrics are at best in the low 10s of millions. Even when you take the all time high metrics with the methodology above it's still well under 100 million.
Considering there are an estimated > 5 billion internet users (crypto TAM) ATH numbers represent approximately 2% adoption, and I'd argue if you used a methodology that could resemble legitimate DAU/MAU stats you see from Meta, etc real adoption is probably 10-50% of that.
I talked about my crypto journey - I looked at the technology over the past five-ten years and agreed with you. I was convinced it was the latest emerging technology that would provide a platform for the things you speak of and more. Then I started realizing no one I knew outside of the crypto-sphere actually used it for anything other than trading on CEXs. That's when I started performing this crude study and realized crypto/blockchain is completely irrelevant. The entire space could disappear tomorrow and barely anyone would notice.
You seem to be much more capable of looking at things more holistically than I do/can. Historically, prior platforms/technologies from everything to the PC, the web, social media, smartphones, etc, etc easily hit 1 billion users inside of ten years. Generally speaking I feel like people are able to embrace things that are actually useful and benefit their lives. Crypto has been around for 14 years, has the benefit of leveraging all of these platforms, and still has abysmal user adoption.
Why?
I understand it probably comes off a little misanthropic, but as I also said, I suspect (many? most? majority? plurality?) of the people involved in crypto really don't even care about any of that, let alone understand it. The unstated corollary to this is that I would presume the people who aren't involved in crypto, on average, understand and appreciate all of these things even less.
I understand that a lot of those 5 billion users weren't born with the privileges I was - I basically rolled all d20's for my stats by being born into one of the wealthiest and highest income countries in the world to a pair of responsible middle class parents and getting both the genes and parenting that I got, in an economic environment where I got to be exposed to having a home computers from the age of about 4, got lucky enough to be born into the highest income county of my state with a fantastic charter school that offered me a better early education than I deserved, all through no virtue of my own, and I think that opened life path doors for me that simply aren't open to an awful lot of people.
Even after all of that, to have the personality type that allows one to be extremely interested in what some would call "esoteric" topics like cryptography, monetary sovereignty, etc, as opposed to someone who just listens to whatever the popular music is, watches whatever the popular TV show is, and is glued to tiktok or Instagram 24/7 is far from guaranteed.
I think to be deeply interested in cryptocurrency for what I subjectively call "the right reasons" is in many ways to be an exception to the norm, both economically and culturally, compared to the user base of "all internet users".
In their defense, I wouldn't recognize any of the top players of the MLB, NBA, NHL, whatever the American football one is, whatever the big European football one is, any of the kardashians, virtually any actor or actress, or musicians, or other cultural figures if I was standing next to them in line at Microcenter - I think it's mostly a question of different interests being held by different people, and "the technical, economic, political, and philosophical aspects of electronic peer-to-peer distributed ledgers" is probably just not a very popular interest.
Again, sorry if any of that comes off as misanthropic, that's not my intention - I am trying to be completely civil.
> I understand it probably comes off a little misanthropic, but as I also said, I suspect (many? most? majority? plurality?) of the people involved in crypto really don't even care about any of that, let alone understand it. The unstated corollary to this is that I would presume the people who aren't involved in crypto, on average, understand and appreciate all of these things even less.
As a rough guess you could probably fit all of the people on the planet who could have a remotely coherent conversation across all of those topics on a mid-sized airplane.
But here's the thing - do you think people who use their cell phone to upload vides to their YouTube channel understand how the optics of the camera work? The intricacies of the HEVC codec? The baseband of the cell modem? Any clue of the internet? Payment processors for their subscribers? The ACH system for their payments? The logistics of UPS for the merch they send out to their fans? The broader economic effects of the gig economy?
No, they don't and they shouldn't. They're off doing their own exceptional things of interest just like Kim K or some professional athlete. All of our lives run on stacks of research papers even far more complicated than "the technical, economic, political, and philosophical aspects of electronic peer-to-peer distributed ledgers". The important thing here is none of this matters to them - what matters is they have this YouTube app, they make videos with it, and people watch them.
They don't understand or appreciate the benefits of the obscure component parts but what they appreciate is the sum - they got to quit their crappy job to be a YouTuber (or whatever). The hundreds of millions of people who "follow" Kim K presumably do so because they see value in it too.
My point is (other than getting fined by the SEC for unlawfully promoting crypto scams) when will the crypto ecosystem deliver something of value/utility to the masses - from Kim K to your grandmother?
On the flip side, what benefits does crypto actually offer? Before talking about economic policy, privacy, owning data, whatever, lets remember a few things:
- People play the lotto because they're bad at math and don't understand economics.
- Everyone has known the US government has been spying on them for decades and no one cares.
- People happily hand their entire lives to giant corporations that sell their data, abuse them, etc so they can post photos online "for free".
- So, so, much more.
For most of the benefits I hear of crypto (like what you've mentioned) my response is "No one cares about any of that". On the contrary - how many password resets do you think Facebook does everyday? Bank of America (60m customers)? How many credit card transactions are reversed?
The fundamental properties ("benefits") of crypto are an ANTI-ADOPTION pattern for people other than those in the airplane with you. They just don't align with fundamental human behavior (forgetting stuff and making mistakes).
I see it like Linux on the desktop. I love Linux. I've run it on the desktop since 1997. For a while there people were saying "Year of the Linux Desktop" because it was going to dethrone Windows. Well, obviously that's a joke for a reason.
The crypto community says the same (ridiculous) things - "replace fiat", "rebuild the entire web with web3 and displace literally everything", "get rid of banks", etc. It's delusional, wishful thinking largely driven by personal financial interests with roots in the economic desperation we referenced earlier.
Oh btw, for the record I NEVER thought Linux was going to have any considerable success on the desktop either ;).
> On the flip side, what benefits does crypto actually offer?
> For most of the benefits I hear of crypto (like what you've mentioned) my response is "No one cares about any of that". On the contrary ...
Right now admittedly, the benefits of Bitcoin are relatively hypothetical.
I think the chance that in a few decades (say 20-30 years) Bitcoin will have turned out to have been a system/technology that will have assisted the world's financial system with converging to principles that'll have brought with them significantly more stability in this financial system and following from this more stability of society .. this chance is greater than zero.
I'd argue that one key problem of the world's current financial system is its (in my opinion) inherent dependency on economic growth. As most people will agree, economic growth has been a good thing for centuries, but humanity has reached a level of (ab)use of natural resources that far outstrips the capacity of ecosystems to recover. Many people would be content with less material goods but for the sake of economic "stability" (and also because voters like presents) governments decide to hop from one growth stimulus package to the next, subsidizing consumption and thus nudging people to buy new stuff instead of maintaining/repairing existing stuff and incentivizing companies to churn out one new variant of an existing product that's often only minimally better and sometimes even worse than the previous one after the other.
Jobs/unemployment is _the_ justification for the never ending growth/stimulus policy that almost no voter will argue against, which is why politics isn't really able to solve this.
From this follows the key solution: for the sake of our ecosphere, the (IMO) inherent dependency on economic growth has to be done away with. Fiat currencies (through the expansive monetary policies they enable) are the basis for the growth dynamic and Bitcoin is a system that enables opting out of it.
You might say: now that's one vague kind of benefit.
Agree, it's vague. But the possibility that Bitcoin can help solve one of humanity's fundamental and existential problems _because_ unlike politicians it cannot easily be corrupted by big money is IMO enough hypothetical benefit to justify its adoption and use.