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Comment by brianolson | Hacker News Reader

I worked in blockchain ("builder") for 5 years. I started 'eh, there are speculators, whatever, I build good tech' but finished 'holy crap speculators completely dominate and distort everything, nobody cares about good tech'

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Yep. As much as I can see utility in some crypto, and there are some personalities in respect (e.g. Vitalik) by and large the sector in such a dumpster fire I'm not going anywhere near it. I've got some bitcoin in a Coinbase account, that's as close as I'm getting.

> nobody cares about good tech

Indeed. For example: Chia is arguably decent tech (better than Bitcoin), built by Bram Cohen (of BitTorrent fame), innovative PoSpace+Time. But nobody cares, it's at #450 in market cap, way down below Doge (#10), $TRUMP (#72), Fartcoin (#144), Melania (#375).

The market cap obsession is part of the problem. Can I use it to buy things, easily? That's the only metric that should count if you're looking for practical use, not speculation.

A successful cryptocurrent probably has to start by first having a market that is dissatisfied with the available traditional currencies. If that market were to introduce on (with good tech), then it could immediately see the cryptocurrency used for its intended purpose. At that point, if it avoided the attention of speculators (not forever, just long enough for it to get its feet underneath itself) or could discourage those speculators somehow, what happens then?

Is there some other failure mode waiting, or does it take off?

It's hard to measure that directly. Market cap is a decent proxy, albeit inexact. If a coin has a market cap of $1.8 trillion, you know a lot of people are doing a lot of something with it, and it's likely that includes using it to buy and sell stuff to some extent. If it has a market cap of $200 million, then there just can't be many people buying and selling with it, and that means it's pretty likely to be difficult to use that way.

Agreed re Chia, but here’s a counterpoint: MXE is 16,000 times faster than FHE, completely changes the concept of computing (that in order to calculate something you need to see the data) and it as a result Arcium the hottest thing in crypto right now.

Nano is also another interesting one or litecoin etc., basically just having low gas fees I guess and being more efficient but I don't like shilling these products because I personally am a stauch believer in stablecoins and there are stablecoins like USDC's on chains like polygons which can satisfy the function "good enough" for me where they have trust etc. which I don't wish to replicate

There are still some 0 gas fees innovations happening in stablecoin marketplaces which is going to be interesting to see how that pans out.

The point i was trying to make was that the disillusionment faced by technologists possibly stemmed from a naivety about how the economy works and how people respond to incentives. Speculators are a "feature/bug" of pretty much any financial system. Stocks, real-estate, fiat-currencies, potatoes - The price of everything is being distorted by speculators. Done right, they bring liquidity, financial stability, and wealth creation. Left to their own devices, they cause volatility, inequity and financial destruction. (Crypto is probably more on the latter side on some of those metrics atm). The People looking to build a good crypto solution has to be clear-eyed about how to handle them.

I also wonder if the author has partly himself to blame. From his post, it looks like he worked for the seedier players in the space (because the pay was better) and is angry at the whole space. Its like a developer who worked for Oracle on MySql swearing off the entire open-source community.

edit: >nobody cares about good tech'

True. That's a big part of why you need [token-holders], "Build it and they will come" is more of a hope than a strategy.

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