Hacker News Reader

Comment by spaceman_2020 | Hacker News Reader

spaceman_2020

I’ve never seen a field with lower adoption than crypto despite billions in marketing.

The actual users on-chain is abysmal and frankly, embarrassing.

Current users onchain is in the thousands. Even when the market was raging, the biggest memecoin in the world could only manage about 1M+ wallets - probably about 80-100k real users.

NFT trading volume is down to under 6-7k active users.

At peak bull market, Tornado Cash, despite its notoriety, had about 125 daily transactions.

Arbitrum, an Ethereum scaling solution, gave out literally free money in the form of an airdrop (I got $15k worth). The airdrop went out to about 650k wallets - under 100k real users.

If crypto were to disappear tomorrow, it would affect a population no bigger than a small Indian town.

An absolute mess. No correlation between adoption and hype/valuation at all.

View on HN

What's the source for your data?

I agree with you on the overhype, but if roughly 16% of active addresses are real users, then active users within the past 24 hours would be around the population of the largest city in Indiana rather than a small town.

Source: DefiLlama

I said small Indian town, not Indiana town :)

Regardless, NFT platform unique daily users down to ~10-12k across platforms:

https://dune.com/queries/1622348/2688962?utm_source=mintorsk...

Total unique daily wallets for Tether (USDT) down to about 80k unique wallets. This is just unique addresses - doesn't filter out bots and users with multiple wallets. You can't go more mainstream than this coin.

https://etherscan.io/token/0xdac17f958d2ee523a2206206994597c...

There are not more than 20-30k active users on chain at any given point.

Aren’t most actual users just in exchange accounts ?

Yes, which means they are using a centralized third party instead of what's being extolled as the "decentralized, trustless" ecosystem. Maybe that's not as big of a feature as it is claimed to be?

As a reminder, this is what original comment was talking about:

> The actual users on-chain is abysmal and frankly, embarrassing.

Which isn't contradictory with most interaction being on a centralized platform.

I guess I just don't think that's a distinction worth making. The size of the ecosystem is what matters. The billions sitting in accounts denominated in that currency, and the daily total volume actually do matter, even if the trades are not mostly not happening on chain.

It matters if you want to draw a distinction between "payment processing system of the future" and "illegal casinos and gambling den", since these two should also be regulated somewhat differently. Evidence points to crypto being more akin to the second, and your comment also provides supporting evidence for that.

> I said small Indian town, not Indiana town :)

Big difference! My mistake.

The stats you're referencing appear to be ETH chain only. I'm not really into NFT's, but aren't they more popular on other chains/rollups because of gas cost?

I think the active users might be at least 3x your estimates, but I could be wrong. For example, tether's market cap is >$80b and only ~$30b of that is on ETH.

https://dune.com/rchen8/defi-users-over-time

And yet, politicians and the SEC, central banks, or even G7, keep talking almost every week about how it needs to be regulated…

Isn’t it weird that there’s so much noise around an industry with so few real users then?

Maybe they want to regulate it because its biggest posterboy (SBF) ran the biggest ponzi since Madoff...

Or maybe because its second biggest posterboy (Do Kwon) ran the second biggest ponzi since Madoff...

Crypto fanboys will defend this trash so much that they've already forgiven and forgotten SBF and Do Kwon.

If this industry wasn't filled with scams siphoning off literally tens of billions in real cash, maybe the SEC wouldn't want to regulate it so strongly.

But aren't there people out there who actually want the SEC's protection? Offering protection to people who don't want it is a creative use of language.

IMO the discourse around crypto is typically poor because it's a shallow proxy to politics/philosophy/economics. But instead of having a meaningful discussion about any one of those topics we get this.

Let's agree crypto is an unregulated digital casino. Why do people care so passionately about code enforcement when it comes to securities? I could possibly see the moral hazard of gambling addiction but given the state of gambling commercials that ship has sailed.

It goes along the same vein as the SEC protecting non-accredited investors from fraud and risk. I appreciate what the SEC does but there's no way to opt-out of being protected? There's no waiver that can be signed to say "I'm totally going to lose my money and that's okay"? Losing money gambling on sports is good. Losing money gambling on private equity will not be tolerated in a civilized society.

Maybe two people can look at the same fence and feel opposite about it. What makes me feel caged could make someone else feel safe

Think of it this way, a system that is 0.01% of the actually useful financial system can still cause 90% of our scams/pollutions/grifts, mostly because of regulatory arbitrage. Doesn't seem that surprising to me.

It's like saying "the police spends most of their time on criminals even though they are a really small percentage of the population." Yes? That's how laws work.

Interestingly, the blockchain is only one of the many innovations tied to crypto.

While it was the main innovation originally it's not that major today.

why is this modded down? This is factual.

Crypto is trading a lot, but on CeFi.

Because not even the blockchain is an innovation.

Your analysis misses the enormous amount of activity including P2P trading that occurs within Binance.

> ... P2P trading that occurs within Binance

Isn't that a... giant oxymoron? Binance is a centralized third party, BSC is a centralized chain run by Changpeng Zhao and his buddies, and in this thread we are talking about actual, on chain usage off of these centralized platforms.

If you're using an exchange whose founder can't even enter the United States and whose HQ is unknown, are you really that much better off than using a plain old bank?

I'm not ideologically opposed to crypto. I believe in its mission.

But this space needs to a very, very deep clean before it can be taken seriously.

While I agree with all of that, what's the adoption of gold? It's almost entirely stored in vaults as storage of value and never "used", not even looked at.

I still believe in crypto as a store of value and hence as a possible future global currency, but 10+ years later and it's still almost entirely speculation.

Recently, some big names (Saudi Arabia, Brazil, maybe China) are moving off the dollar and in search of a new global currency. Let us see.

Huh? Adoption of gold is in the billions of users.

Every single Indian and Chinese household that has any money at all owns at least some gold in the form of jewelry.

>Adoption of gold is in the billions of users.

To be fair, gold has had atleast 1000 years to gain adoption as money by half the world. Crypto in comparison will probably reach that level of adoption after 30-50 years of existence.

Gold didn't reach its current adoption over 1000 years. It always had the current adoption rate. 1000 years ago, if someone gave you gold, you wouldn't wonder, "gee, should I keep this shiny yellow metal or throw it away?" - you would keep it.

We've found gold ornaments in pre-pottery neolithic sites dating back thousands of years. The % of people who want to own gold was near 100% even thousands of years ago.

If anything, gold adoption rate has declined in the modern fiat age, at least in western countries.

>Gold didn't reach its current adoption over 1000 years.

I didn't say it did, you seem to have misread my post.

>It always had the current adoption rate.

>The % of people who want to own gold was near 100% even thousands of years ago.

I dont know how you could possibly make a claim like this and defend it. Source?

Edit: Looks like about half is in the form of jewelry gold, which is a lot more than a little. I wonder how much of that jewelry is ever "used" or if it's stored in a vault as an asset. I hope it's able to be seen!

Half of all the gold in the world has been mined since 1965 if you'd like another factoid :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com