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So cryptocurrency is dead, right? After some brief interest around the middle 2010s, where some vendors actually did accept it, they seem to have all revoked th

• KMnO4 6y ago
  Don't forget anonymous payments. Lots of vendors selling legally questionable (or illegal) things only take cryptocurrencies. I see that as a huge boon for these industries, who would otherwise have to figure out credit card processing, bank transfers, or being repeatedly shut down by Paypal/Venmo/etc.
  • floatboth 6y ago
    Not anonymous (mainstream creeptocurrencies are traceable by design!) but censorship resistant. Yes, this is the ONLY use case for the buttcoins. The problem is that for every successful weed and nudes sale there's a million ransomware attacks, scam calls, and absolutely fraudulent "investments".
    • Passthepeas 6y ago
      completely false, privacy coins command billions of dollars in market cap, Monero alone is currently worth 2.2 billion and will likely continue to grow.
• zeroxfe 6y ago
  The cryptocurrency space is quite alive, and is thriving. As much as people like to hate on it, the whole space rife with engineering, social, and economic challenges that attract geeks. Unfortunately, it attracts a lot of scammers too.
  • SQueeeeeL 6y ago
    Sounds like magic the gathering card econ. Which is super fun! But personally, I definitely don't consider specing into Embercleave a meaningful societal mover
    • jand 6y ago
      Funny detail: Magic the gathering hits very close to home by accident. One of the (back then) dominating bitcoin exchanges used the domain mtgox.com which was an acronym for "magic the gathering online exchange".
      • SkyMarshal 6y ago
        Yeah, it was previously a Magic The Gathering exchange, and then converted to a Bitcoin exchange. They learned the hard way you need a higher standard of engineering for a financial exchange.
        • ptd 6y ago
          Wasn’t it an inside job? Or Arles the heavily speculated?
          • jandrese 6y ago
            Nobody knows for sure, but the postmortem suggests that it might have been straight up incompetence. However, it's certainly possible to consider that the "incompetence" was on purpose to hide the fact that he was stealing from the company. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l70iRcSxqzo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l70iRcSxqzo
    • arcadeparade 6y ago
      "defi" is an interesting concept that gained a lot of traction over the summer. Over $10 billion in crypto assets has been deposited in various protocols such as Aave which is like a decentralised bank operating on ethereum.
    • dfxm12 6y ago
  • tyre 6y ago
    The space is thriving in that people are working on it, but I wouldn't say it is thriving in terms of non-crypto people actually using these products. It's a pretty self-contained bubble of geeks building things for other geeks. Which isn't not interesting! But the expectations set by the cryptonauts was that this was all going to change the world. And then ran face first into the reasons the existing systems work the way that they do, haven't communicated well to "average" people, can't tell a non-theoretical/ideological story of why what they build exists, etc. There are some great people working on crypto projects, but I wouldn't say it is thriving. The only mainstream company is Coinbase and they make money based on trading, not any underlying tangible value of the coins.
    • vmception 6y ago
      > But the expectations set by the cryptonauts was that this was all going to change the world. So what? "omg this ycombinator founder didn't change the world" said nobody ever But mention crypto one time.... I guess it is nice that it is held up to a separate higher standard and captivates the minds of some people willing to help it get there. Some people here mentioned a standard about merchant adoption, even to that, so what? thats the least interesting use case, the M0 money supply is small in exchange systems people choose to respect, its panned out the same way in crypto but people decide to make a separate standard of "hey a lot of this is used for speculation! I don't consider that a use case, is it because I'm ignorant of how fiat currencies work, no, can't be". There are various services for merchants that shield the merchant from knowing crypto is being used, and various services for consumers (like debit cards) that shield them from needing to directly use crypto. That exists, not a lot of fanfare is needed, if you want to use that you can and don't need to write a whole blog post about it. Its not an interesting use case, no matter how much you felt you needed to quantify its use in that way in order to feel better about it. It also works, shrug, onchain (+tx eventually settled onchain) transaction volume is at all time highs and it doesn't even make international news because its not news, as it should be.
• crumbshot 6y ago
  Not quite, it still has one positive use case: buying drugs (and other similarly prohibited items) off the dark web. And there remains plenty of interest in academia, there are still many fascinating areas of research in this space.
• seibelj 6y ago
  BTC is currently $11.5k USD, market cap $200 billion+. This is a valuable asset.
  • coldpie 6y ago
    Yeah but like, what's it valuable for? It seems like commodity trading, except the commodity that is being traded is who gets stuck holding the bag when it all collapses. There's no real value there.
    • leppr 6y ago
      It's money not controlled by any single government or entity. It can be exchanged almost as easily as cash. If you don't see the use in that, then good for you, your needs must be met by the existing financial services. Personally, I used it to buy electronics in Japan, worked well. Also used it to sell my VR headset in person, because Paypal and our banks didn't allow the transfer. I use it to tip and donate to various online creators with no fuss. It's really quite simple, no need to overthink it. Sure, maybe one day the price will crash or the peg fail, but for most intents and purposes it works fine. Monitoring crypto prices and fundamentals is not so bad compared with traditional finance folks having to read through hundreds of all-caps tweets to know how much value the USD will lose this month, or sifting through reddit WSB troll posts to know which stock to buy.
      • floatboth 6y ago
        It's "money" controlled by a few large electricity-wasting pools.
        • aeternum 6y ago
          Still more efficient than the alternatives. USD is controlled by an entity which spends $680 billion / year along with countless lives and 270k barrels of oil a day in order to defend it. Gold dug out of the ground, then put in high tech vaults which must be similarly actively defended.
      • 6y ago
• JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > cryptocurrency is dead, right? No, not quite. Total new investment into the space is falling. But it’s nowhere close to zero. It will probably never totally die. Instead, like baseball cards or beanie babies, it will atrophy into obscurity. There are enough people who have sunk enough into the project—financially, reputationally—that, barring a depression, it will continue to have backers for at least another few decades. As long as Tether doesn’t overplay its hand, prices should keep the illusion going. It’s a cautionary tale regarding the staying power of purposeless institutions.
  • intotheabyss 6y ago
    You're implying that there are zero use cases for public cryptocurrencies other than as collectibles. This couldn't be further from the truth. There's a thriving decentralized finance ecosystem on Ethereum with more than 10B in value locked away. DeFi is an application that's only made possible because of the existence of an open public smart contract protocol. You're being very disingenuous.
• deleted 6y ago
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• cryptica 6y ago
  I was a Bitcoin skeptic for years so I understand this point of view. This point of view makes sense if you assume that the financial system works properly which is what the vast majority of people still assume. The vast majority of people are wrong. The financial system doesn't work; it's easy to exploit. It's no coincidence that many cryptocurrency enthusiasts are hackers; they found vulnerabilities in the system and are exploiting it. In the context of our corrupt, dysfunctional system, the value is solid and price will always go up in the long run. Corporations are also exploiting the financial system using many of the same tricks, but cryptocurrencies have the advantage of being completely faceless and totally unaccountable. It's the next phase in the evolution of corporate personhood; which was a horrible but very successful idea. It's all about reducing liability. Whatever financial instrument is best at reducing its liability will win.
  • smsm42 6y ago
    You seem to be confusing two things - system working and system being un-exploitable. Example - it's pretty easy to shoplift in any of the retail shops. In fact, shoplifting happens all the time. Still, nobody would claim retail model doesn't work because people would just come and shoplift everything and nobody would pay and the retailer would go bust. What actually happens is that vast majority of people do not shoplift, and the retail system works and produces massive profits. > but cryptocurrencies have the advantage of being completely faceless and totally unaccountable Advantage, but also disadvantage. If a bank cheats you, you have options to complain to regulators, to the police, to the FBI, to you Congress representative finally. It won't work in all cases, but it's an option that's available to you. If a crypto scammer cheats you, well, nobody is accountable. For some people, it's a big issue, because it greatly increases the friction in transactions.
    • cryptica 6y ago
      This is not true because the bank does cheat me. Has been cheating me for a decade but the police won't do anything about it. If I try to sue the Reserve Bank, the judge will dismiss my case without even hearing the evidence. Also, politicians never answer my emails and I did try. I must be living on a different planet.
• trident1000 6y ago
  Theres people who use it for certain things, like PornHub just started accepting BTC payments. But there has never been more institutional and high net worth interest in BTC than now as a value store and adoption for a global reserve currency (we can see this from the institutional gateway inflows). Some recent examples: Microstrategy invested $425 million in BTC over treasuries. Twitter bought $50 million the other week (and Jack Dorsey owns BTC personally). Paul Tudor Jones bought in with about 2% of his total assets. Its gaining traction in this area as a value store.
  • SQueeeeeL 6y ago
    Wait, that sounds like fraud. The CEO of a company had the company he runs buy into a limited asset he also owns... Gg society, the fact that we're talking this up like it's a good thing means most of us deserve to be poor af
    • trident1000 6y ago
      Sounds a little dramatic (especially since 50 million isnt moving the price single handedly). Also stock buybacks are essentially the same thing (if you were to call it a conflict of interest) and almost every company in existence does that.
      • SQueeeeeL 6y ago
        You just talked about Twitter buying BTC as important news showing it's viability though... It's mostly a popularity/buzz game. Also yeah, stock buybacks were illegal up until 1982 and since there legalization we've seen large trades in companies from R&D spending towards buyback spending...
        • trident1000 6y ago
          I mentioned several noteworthy people and institutions making an investment to demonstrate a trend. "its mostly a popularity/buzz game" yeah thats how value networks work. From gold to cash to facebook.
• pjkundert 6y ago
  As a Canadian consultant working for US clients, I can assure you — the worst Cryptocurrency usability problems are better than the typical Canada/US wire transfer Banking experience.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • wmf 6y ago
    The first time I sent a wire from US to Canada it bounced because I didn't include the street address of the branch where the recipient account was located. The mind boggles.
    • smsm42 6y ago
      I was always wondering - virtually all money being electronic now, what the heck they are doing with all those branch addresses? I don't even have "branch address" - my account is just numbers, and if I need some live human service, I just walk into any random branch and they are happy to help me.
      • wmf 6y ago
        I sure hope there's not a server in the back of each branch holding account state... (Now this reminds me of Katrina when local New Orleans banks lost their primary and backup data centers and took weeks to recover account balances.)
        • bleepblorp 6y ago
          While I doubt there's a server in each branch managing account balances, there's is some kind of branch-related weirdness involved in bank account management at some banks. With some banks, if you open a bank account at a branch in one time zone but later move to another time zone, your transactions will still be processed according to the business hours where the account was opened. I know someone who is in this situation and they can't make transactions for several hours towards the end of the day (after midnight in the originating branch's timezone) because their bank's online banking front end can't agree with the bank's backend system about what day it is.
• cryptica 6y ago
  The idea that the financial system works seems to be a contradiction when you consider that cryptocurrencies (which exist within that system) have been performing extremely well for over a decade. If scams can thrive so well in our system (to the point of becoming worth hundreds of billions of dollars), then how do we know that the biggest corporations are not scams too? How do we know they're not all empty shells? Their earnings (P/E ratios) are very low... And on top of that, I would question the source and legitimacy of these modest earnings. What kind of system allows scams of this scale to thrive for over a decade? What kind of system supports bailouts of big corporations every few years? Corruption of the media? Corruption of politics? I don't think any of these fit the description of a 'working system'. EDIT And what kind of system supports downvoting (thus trying to censor) such a logical comment as this one?
• jMyles 6y ago
  One data point: we're launching the NuCypher Ursula service on ethereum mainnet tonight at UTC midnight. So, quite far from dead in some people's minds. :-)
• thom 6y ago
  Yes but the _appetite_ for these scams is seemingly infinite, so crypto seems far from dead.
• smsm42 6y ago
  It's not dead, but it's not mainstream either. It's a bit like quidditch - there are a bunch of people interested in it, and they have their own ecosystem, but don't expect the Olympic Committee to be calling anytime soon. OTOH, the regulators are getting quite serious in recognizing crypto - including reporting requirements and enforcement. The era where it was tiny enough the IRS basically didn't care except for tiny amount of outlier cases is gone.
• miguelmota 6y ago
  Far from dead. It's been growing rapidly, particularly the decentralized finance (defi) space. Number of transactions has been steadily going up in Ethereum: https://etherscan.io/chart/tx https://etherscan.io/chart/tx
  • dr-detroit 6y ago
    As far as a way to remain untraceable (organized crime) or untaxable (the elites) the main use cases for crypto have moved on particularly to things (like designer handbags) that actually accrue value over time and/or are not numbered and tracked publicly.
• Shared404 6y ago
  Newegg at least still accepts it. I believe Humble does as well, but I don't know that.