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So it's more of an act of self-defense.
And it's not just about Bitcoin, it happens again and again. It would be amusing, but I'm painfully aware that I fall into the trap myself from time to time.
Merkle trees are probably the main cryptocurrency tech I've seen outside of cryptocurrency (& even then in limited use), and that's not even from cryptocurrency but a pretty old data structure concept from 1979. If you're familiar with R&D ideas generated by the blockchain researches that have been applied successfully outside of the blockchain, please enlighten me as I'm eager to fill the gaps in my knowledge and go down a reading rabbit hole.
Look, I'm not discounting out of hand that there's maybe been some research and market value created. What I tried to communicate is I'm not convinced it's been a net positive vs all the costs that came with it (investments lost, pollution, opportunity cost lost). That's why I said market value is a measure, but humans in general struggle to figure out holistic ways of computing value, especially when looking at it as a hypothetical opportunity cost vs what else we could be spending our time on.
If you're wondering why you got downvoted, I suspect it's because you wrote an emotional response attacking me and calling me ignorant without actually engaging in a thoughtful discussion.
For crypto, the criticisms are well founded. Crypto generates enormous amounts of pollution, facilitates money laundering, the sale of illegal goods and all manner of scams and for what? The shittiest database you could imagine.
Some illegal goods should perhaps be legal. The cost in time and money of certain diagnoses and drug prescriptions is too high at the moment, and some of us can't put our lives on hold.
FTFY
It's a currency barely, it has value mostly, as long as people keep believing. But the only "industry" there is is Bitcoin exchanges, and we've seen time and time again how they're run by what kind of people.
there are two things that could help fix that:
1. dang and the moderators should heavily flag "unsubstantial" comments on crypto-related posts. many HN users use any post about crypto assets to talk about an irrelevant philosophical view on the entire sector's existence, many of those users of course work for a democracy destabilizing adtech conglomerate and don't see the irony in their focus on "no utility, scams, money laundering" when there are other things going on but even then those users just want to move the goalpost about why those other things aren't useful instead of how it could be. those comments should all be flagged and users should be requested to talk about the article in question.
2. HN users interested in particular discussions can post them more, and ensure engagement occurs on those posts. For example, deep discussions about Taproot and the organizations building on that should have been here, and should be. Code based solutions should be born here and carried back to repositories and other forums. A network's "improvement proposal" should be discussed here, and the implementation details, or updates on network consensus. Libraries that developers use should be talked about here ad nauseam.
ethers.js for EVM based platforms and you can find competitors for that here https://www.alchemy.com/alternatives/ethers-js
they all have deficiencies and there are active pull requests and things to improve in all of them
an additional part of the stack would be the node software itself, how do you run a client that connects to any particular blockchain. the node software is all pretty pathetic and there is often a project in a programming language of choice, as well as for each blockchain
additionally there are improvement proposals on each blockchain, and many times each DAO (projects on a blockchain). think about the blockchain networks as states and each improvement proposal is a referendum. while a DAO would be like any corporation or trust or non profit within that state, having its own community board altering things
you can propose an improvement proposal in any, or get involved in a certain one
You can find them by using the acronym, current bitcoin improvement proposals are called BIPs, ethereum’s EIP, solana SIP… at one project level you have Helium which is very active and uses HIP and so on
basically you have a bifurcation of the population here: there is a group of people that see something wrong with blockchains and dismiss it for that reason, while there is another group that see something wrong with blockchains and go to improve it. most of the confidence in blockchains comes from its ratification process and ability to change. one long necessary and outstanding change gets ratified and opens up a new market, a new sector for the crypto concept to touch, then irrational exuberance comes, then it fades, an additional ratification finishes, the same thing occurs from people too excited about it. Ultimately each advance adds to the resilience and more people find the development and proposals as a meaningful way to contribute.