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I really, really don't understand where cryptocurrencies are going. Billions have been poured in this technology for almost no actual return technologically wis

• rawbot 6y ago
  IIRC Dogecoin was born as a meme. And now I'm supposed to believe it is a serious investment or cryptocurrency?
  • jcbrand 6y ago
    Nobody is claiming that it's a serious investment.
  • BLKNSLVR 6y ago
    Dogecoin is, and always was, a meme; a joke cryptocurrency. But it developed a life of its own and, unfortunately, opportunists have been putting Doge on fish hooks and, surprisingly, catching a helluva lot of fish. It is not, and never will be, a serious investment. The problem is, there are still fish that will believe it is a serious "opportunity" if they're shown the right kind of profit figures, truthful or otherwise.
  • imtringued 6y ago
    It's unfortunate that most cryptocurrencies are just as serious as Dogecoin.
• lawn 6y ago
  There's a big difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash: the intent to scale on-chain while Bitcoin has given up that leading to today's ridiculous transaction fees. Monero is the best approach to actual privacy as it conceals sender, receiver and transaction amount for all transactions. I do agree that the speculation focus is misguided, but there are cryptos that are useful the way Bitcoin was meant to be.
  • imtringued 6y ago
    I consider Monero useful but most of its users are unethical. It's pretty telling that the author of the blog post bashes it in the exact way you should. "Don't buy it" as if it was meant to be speculated with.
    • takoid 6y ago
      Wasn’t Bitcoin painted in a similar light before it became mainstream? Monero’s users being unethical (in your opinion) is a testament to the usefulness of the technology, not the other way around. Would you say the same thing about Tor?
      • ashtonkem 6y ago
        All the claims of Bitcoin being anonymous were either incredibly misguided or delusional. Bitcoin is arguably far less anonymous than even cash, as it creates a permanent record of transactions. If your account is ever de-anonymized, and there are good techniques to do that, then any transaction you’ve ever sent ever is going to be visible. The only privacy benefit Bitcoin has over cash is that it’s easier to transmit it remotely, which eliminates in person risk. Monero is at least designed to be anonymous. It’s possible that some flaw or mistake will eventually be uncovered that will break its privacy, but the underlying structure is better.
      • JacobSuperslav 6y ago
        i would replace unethical with illegal and that would be right.
• dgellow 6y ago
  IOHK who is behind Cardano does quite a lot of scentific research and formalized and developed innovative concepts: https://iohk.io/en/research/library/ https://iohk.io/en/research/library/. It's still very experimental and yes, there are no clear applications yet, but there is some genuine research being made.
  • maeln 6y ago
    This is genuinely very interesting :) . I hope for more innovation like this and less copy-cat, get rich-scheme cryptos ....
    • dgellow 6y ago
      Yes, there is some very interesting papers there. Really unfortunate that virtually 100% of the general cryptocurrency interest is in its price potential.
  • MaxKK 6y ago
    The same can be said about Lisk with 35 blockchain technology research papers already published and another 19 blockchain interoperability research papers to be published in spring. https://github.com/LiskHQ/lips https://github.com/LiskHQ/lips
• dgellow 6y ago
  > Polkadot and Kusama I don't think you're actually expecting an answer, but the main difference is that Kusama is a "canary chain" with faster iteration speed (governance votes last 7 days instead of 28 days for Polkadot). https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/en/learn-kusama-vs-polkadot https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/en/learn-kusama-vs-polkad... You can see it as a long-living testnet.
  • maeln 6y ago
    Actually it was nice to have an answer :) . So at least this one make sense.
• globular-toast 6y ago
  Same. I was super excited for bitcoin ten years ago, but now I've experienced first hand how bad bitcoin is as a currency. Most people aren't even thinking of using it like that. It's just sitting in their coinbase account. So you've just got a bunch of people who all expect to make money from each other. Without any actual value it's a zero sum game, folks!
  • audunw 6y ago
    > Without any actual value it's a zero sum game, folks! It's less than zero-sum. A significant portion of what's being put into the system, is just being burned, in the form of converting electricity to heat without doing much if any useful work.
  • imtringued 6y ago
    In practice you are waiting for technologically illiterate people to lose their Bitcoin or old people to pass away without revealing their wallet to anyone. That's a pretty weird form of "investment".
    • JamesSwift 6y ago
      Thats actually pretty similar to people that invest in collectible cards (e.g. sports or trading card games like Magic). One part of the value increasing is due to supply attrition. Existing cards get either damaged or lost.
      • derivagral 6y ago
        This is itself a (funny?) form of a Tontine! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine
  • afishisafish 6y ago
    Look at the Bitcoin as the defacto reference of value for other crypto that do solve other problems. It's import to have a store of value that's not traditional fiat (like USD).
• charcircuit 6y ago
  >Billions have been poured in this technology for almost no actual return technologically wise. This is just ignorance. There are plenty of projects out there that are building off each other, improving, and trying new things. Later in your post you mention several projects yet there you are claiming there is no new technology being done? >It really seems like nobody actually care about advancing the state of art, except actual researcher who work in universities and not in crypto startups... So researchers are doing research as opposed to startups. I am falling to see the problem with your statement. Yes, people intentionally trying to find new solutions to problems cryptocurrency offers will be the ones finding solutions. >This is proven by btc being one of the most traded and valuable crypto even though it is one of the crypto with the less feature. I am sure you can find plenty of companies that had better technology but are doing worse than their competitors whether it be because of bad marketing, first mover advantage / network effects, etc. >And because crypto are seen as an investment, everybody is holding, and nobody is using it Oh please. You can go to any block explore and see tons of transactions going on. People are using smart contracts all the time. >And no, "stable coin" is not an answer since the only thing they have been used for is to trade between crypto... This is short sighted. There is a desire for being able to know that your money isn't going to crash before you have to pay your bills. It will be easier to onboard people to using crypto if it is just using something like dollars. It also gets lid of problems like buying crypto to buy something then the price crashes and you can no longer afford what you wanted to bought. Or the opposite where you buy something and then the crypto doubles and you get mad for "overpaying." >you get thousand of startup coming out of nowhere proposing new crypto that are literally clone of other crypto So what? If you don't want to use a fork, then don't use it. This is how open source works. Anyone can take your code and create a company around it. >Tell me, what is the difference between Polkadot and Kusama ? Or is there even a significant technological difference between Litecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, etc ? How about you look up the differences yourself. Not everyone agrees with what design decisions get made so forks are created that are free to make different decisions.
• imtringued 6y ago
  >Or is there even a significant technological difference between Litecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, etc ? I would like to argue that the difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash isn't even a technological one. Every dunce can increase the block size. It's purely a political/social difference. It's laughable that cryptocurrencies market themselves as avoiding government control but yet they suffer from the exact same problems.
  • ashtonkem 6y ago
    Arguably most crypto currencies are run by oligopolies, putting them in a worse place than even the troubled democracies of the west. How small is the pool of people who control 51% of the hashing power for any given currency? Probably not terribly large.
• derefr 6y ago
  > And no, "stable coin" is not an answer since the only thing they have been used for is to trade between crypto... Our (blockchain-adjacent) company received millions in equity investment in the form of stablecoin transfers. Those investors were so heavily “in” crypto, that they didn’t have any liquidity of useful size in any actual fiat currency, so they wouldn’t have been able to invest in us in “real money.” We only got those investments by being willing to accept stablecoins. Compounding that advantage, there were no exchange fees at any point during the transaction for accepting investments from foreign holders (as they were already holding USDC—where a foreign investor would find it a lot harder to hold actual USD in their local banks); and there were only minimal, flat transfer fees (i.e. gas) to get the whole investment done, as opposed to the percentile fees charged for international wire transfers. I would say that that was a pretty useful use-case for stablecoins. Of course, when we received these stablecoin investments, we gradually offramped them for actual fiat money. What were we going to do, pay our employees in stablecoins? And at that point we had to pay exchange fees, because we aren’t even a US company ourselves, and so we were off-ramping for our own local currency, not USD. (Though this was cheaper than expected, as we directly off-ramped the USDC to our local currency through a provider that kept liquidity in our local currency. We never needed to get the regular banking infrastructure involved until the final step—depositing fiat money already denominated in our local currency, into our local banks.) But just because we didn’t have a reason to keep/spend the original stablecoins, doesn’t mean it wasn’t useful for the asset to remain in stablecoin form until it reached us. It was certainly more useful to our investors to hold USDC than to hold fiat currency. > Tell me, what is the difference between Polkadot and Kusama ? Or is there even a significant technological difference between Litecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, etc ? Is there a significant technological difference between the central banks of the US, India, China, Canada, Japan, the UK, etc.? Not really. The difference is that different countries are running them, and those countries are effectively different “political technologies.” The choice comes down to the relative merits of the political technology driving the progress and decision-making in the monetary technology. In this sense, it’s sort of like if there’s a single open-source project that was originally BSD/MIT-licensed, that has been forked a bunch of times, with each fork replacing that license with something else and establishing a separate “structure” to its maintainership (e.g. one fork being an Apache Software Foundation project; one fork being a reference implementation governed by an enterprise “open-membership” body; one fork being GPLed, run by a BDFL who accepts PRs, but is very opinionated, and suggests you fork their fork if you want to go a different way; etc.) Those are all different “political technologies” driving the same project forward in different directions!
• svachalek 6y ago
  It's going slower than the WWW but I feel it could be just as big. There are major problems with big banks, social networks, and the advertising model of the web and crypto can solve all of this: decentralization, democratization, and micropayments all in one. No doubt it will create its own problems but there is big potential. Just look at what's going on with Ethereum and Defi instead of the older generation of deflationary currencies. But you are right, there are way too many attempts at new networks and currencies, when we need to be consolidating around the best of those and building up the application layer. I think there are huge opportunities for people who create the killer apps for crypto.
  • qeternity 6y ago
    Why do people still lump crypto and micropayments together? Decentralization is always going to be less efficient and thus more costly than centralized equivalents which makes it just about the worst solution for micropayments.