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Yeah - I started off cautiously optimistic, but I've gotten more and more confident in its long term future. The DeFi tech is real, but early. Vitalik Buterin

Yeah - I started off cautiously optimistic, but I've gotten more and more confident in its long term future. The DeFi tech is real, but early. Vitalik Buterin is a really good leader for Ethereum and development. Vitalik Interview: https://www.stitcher.com/show/rationally-speaking/episode/intellectual-honesty-cryptocurrency-more-vitalik-buterin-82142288 https://www.stitcher.com/show/rationally-speaking/episode/in... This is a worthwhile list to read through: https://danromero.org/crypto-reading/ https://danromero.org/crypto-reading/ The main issue for outsiders is that the industry is surrounded by snake oil salesman and people that don't know what they're talking about (the 'evil central bank' types), but the underlying tech is real and the potential is real (imo). If you look at it quickly you might dismiss it all, but I think that'd be a mistake. The ability to manage decentralized state is very cool, but there's a lot to build to make it viable (and as a result, there's a lot of opportunity). When something is hard, there's often value in making it easier. There's also a lot of stuff in legacy finance that requires humans to do and is slow. Multi-day financial transfers for clearing and high associated fees for wires (at some banks) - crypto options are much better and modern implementations of the legacy stack. The current state is still a bit unstable, and the UX is a disaster, but the future is clearly better (imo) in a way legacy systems will have trouble competing with. As an aside, 'wealth inequality' is a feature you want in effective capitalist systems (you can still protect the lower bound). http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html In 1999 a lot of people recognized the value of the internet (though many still dismissed it [0]), but there was also a lot of dumb money and failure - loud people who didn't know what was going on. The web obviously became extremely economically relevant despite all of that. There's some similar potential here - I think it'll just take a while to shake out. [0] "By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s." -Paul Krugman (1998) Irony of the above quote is it's wrong on two levels - the internet, but also the impact of the fax machine (also huge).

rawtxapp 5y ago
Yes, the loud mouths on twitter and other social networks are definitely a turn-off and pretty annoying. For anyone who's looking into more serious/technical discussions, I think looking through github contributions, whitepapers, technical parts of bitcointalk and in depth interviews of legitimate contributors to the ecosystem (like Vitalik) is much more informative and has better signal to noise ratios.
deregulateMed 5y ago
I'm not convinced Vitalik is a great leader. Ethereum is currently an infinite coin like Doge. The miners have taken control and blew past the original soft cap of 100M Eth of EIP 669. I'm sure he made more mistakes, but that and the ETH classic debacle makes me think he's an idol to be worshiped. Heck POS is a reaction to the original ETH being unable to scale. Sure infinite coins can be fixed later, but the same can be said about Bitcoin. If POS works, it can be implemented on Bitcoin.
- fossuser 5y ago
  POS is a reasonable trade-off to solve scaling and make DeFi practical (imo) - his blog posts about it and arguments make sense. > "Sure infinite coins can be fixed later, but the same can be said about Bitcoin. If POS works, it can be implemented on Bitcoin." In theory yes, in practice no. BTC community elevated a clear con-man fake Satoshi because he took sides in a block size political battle. They can't even agree to increase the block size. This lack of leadership is a problem, moving to ETH2 is a serious project and requires a leader, priorities, direction etc. I don't think BTC can do any of this.
- doggosphere 5y ago
  If POS works, it can be implemented on Bitcoin. Yes, but can you convince the hardcore PoW maximalists to join your fork? IMO Bitcoin is doing its best to be a raw, pseudo-physical element. That means immutability, costs rooted in the physical world, etc. The community will change its protocols sparingly and slowly. To some who prefer rapid change and development this is unattractive. But to Bitcoiners, decentralization and immutability are the foundations of this new type of property. They are uninterested in technical gains that come with complexity and risk.
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    Check out how doggosphere conducts himself, and how dishonest he is. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27843693 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27843693
- api 5y ago
mattmiller 5y ago
I agree with your assessment of the tech but the snake oil is a real turn off. What do I do? Hard to invest money when it feels so scammy.
- rawtxapp 5y ago
  DYOR (Do Your Own Research), don't fomo into coins just because they are pumping in price. Read through their code (or how many contributors, how much contributions it gets, etc) which is something that you can't do with current financial system and if any of those projects don't open source their code, stay as far away as possible. Inspect the on-chain data to see how much is it actually used, etc. Look at Google Trends, look at their community sizes, etc. There's a lot of datapoints that you can use or you can find reliable people and rely on their judgments. Also, if you're simply looking for investment, you can't go wrong with BTC/ETH portfolio, they have been proven to work over many years now and most of the remaining altcoins are correlated with them in price anyways.
- fossuser 5y ago
  The stuff I linked above I thought was good. Unfortunately, as is becoming more and more true in our pretty weird modern inter-connected world there's no substitute for getting your own hands dirty, reading primary sources and trying to understand what's true and what's bullshit yourself. Only then can you really evaluate who is worth listening to and what is actually interesting (I found the above stuff I linked to be good, but you should judge them for yourself). The 'investment' bit is kind of secondary (https://soliditylang.org/ https://soliditylang.org/), I personally think BTC, ETH, and Coinbase stock are the main long term bets - other stuff has extreme risk and requires a lot of attention to know if it's worthwhile or not. I do think the ZCash privacy model is cool. Basically, I wouldn't invest unless you're going to sort through the nonsense yourself. Though like any investing the stuff where the value is harder to see is also where the bigger returns are (and the bigger failures).
- doggosphere 5y ago
  You stay away from the moonshots and stick to proven chains with users, transactions, and development.
root_axis 5y ago
DeFi is terrible. I spent a lot of effort digging into the DeFi ecosystem but it's either scams or pointless. I've seen one or two interesting ideas like e.g. these decentralized hedge fund things, but 100% of them are money losers relative to just holding eth - and that's without factoring in all the wasted money in gas fees. DeFi is DOA.
- rawtxapp 5y ago
  Maker is pretty useful for getting collateralized loans, compound is pretty useful for generating yield by lending to others, uniswap is freaking amazing as a dex and you can trade anything by creating liquidity pools without permission, aave is very useful for arbitraging market inefficiencies away risk-free, so on and on. Gas fees are going to become minimal with layer 2. If you dig enough, you'll see a lot of very useful and important projects being built by some very capable engineers. This kind of comment reminds me of when people were predicting that internet was going to be a useless thing[1]. 1: https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306 https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...
- fossuser 5y ago
  To me this is like complaining about webvan in the 90s and missing the forest through the trees. DAOs, and AMMs are interesting - there's a lot of potential in leveraging DeFi to make systems that can work in ways better than existing legacy tech, it's just hard and people don't have it already figured out to the point where looking at it makes it obvious. General public state is a new thing and how it can be used is being figured out (oracles, programmable money, etc.). When something is new it looks more 'pointless' and toy-like. It takes a while for its value to become truly obvious to everyone (and it requires some people to see that value early).
- arcticbull 5y ago
  DeFi is broadly speaking a decentralized 2008. The leverage and liquidations are IMO part of the reason for the magnitude of the draw-down in the last month, and why there's a lot more room to the downside. There's reasons why we have regulations and laws governing investment. Because without them we had the Great Depression. I believe the great financial speed-run has hit Mid-1929. Before the Securities Act, Securities Exchange Act, Regulation S and Regulation T, before the SEC, CFTC and FDIC. A world of unrestricted margin, wildcat banks, hucksters, shills, snake-oil salesmen, and some, I assume, are good people. Crypto is what the stock market would look like if everyone at the SEC decided to take a few months vacation at once, a financial version of The Purge.

rawtxapp 5y ago

Yes, the loud mouths on twitter and other social networks are definitely a turn-off and pretty annoying. For anyone who's looking into more serious/technical discussions, I think looking through github contributions, whitepapers, technical parts of bitcointalk and in depth interviews of legitimate contributors to the ecosystem (like Vitalik) is much more informative and has better signal to noise ratios.

deregulateMed 5y ago

I'm not convinced Vitalik is a great leader. Ethereum is currently an infinite coin like Doge. The miners have taken control and blew past the original soft cap of 100M Eth of EIP 669. I'm sure he made more mistakes, but that and the ETH classic debacle makes me think he's an idol to be worshiped. Heck POS is a reaction to the original ETH being unable to scale. Sure infinite coins can be fixed later, but the same can be said about Bitcoin. If POS works, it can be implemented on Bitcoin.

fossuser 5y ago
POS is a reasonable trade-off to solve scaling and make DeFi practical (imo) - his blog posts about it and arguments make sense. > "Sure infinite coins can be fixed later, but the same can be said about Bitcoin. If POS works, it can be implemented on Bitcoin." In theory yes, in practice no. BTC community elevated a clear con-man fake Satoshi because he took sides in a block size political battle. They can't even agree to increase the block size. This lack of leadership is a problem, moving to ETH2 is a serious project and requires a leader, priorities, direction etc. I don't think BTC can do any of this.
doggosphere 5y ago
If POS works, it can be implemented on Bitcoin. Yes, but can you convince the hardcore PoW maximalists to join your fork? IMO Bitcoin is doing its best to be a raw, pseudo-physical element. That means immutability, costs rooted in the physical world, etc. The community will change its protocols sparingly and slowly. To some who prefer rapid change and development this is unattractive. But to Bitcoiners, decentralization and immutability are the foundations of this new type of property. They are uninterested in technical gains that come with complexity and risk.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  Check out how doggosphere conducts himself, and how dishonest he is. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27843693 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27843693
api 5y ago

mattmiller 5y ago

I agree with your assessment of the tech but the snake oil is a real turn off. What do I do? Hard to invest money when it feels so scammy.

rawtxapp 5y ago
DYOR (Do Your Own Research), don't fomo into coins just because they are pumping in price. Read through their code (or how many contributors, how much contributions it gets, etc) which is something that you can't do with current financial system and if any of those projects don't open source their code, stay as far away as possible. Inspect the on-chain data to see how much is it actually used, etc. Look at Google Trends, look at their community sizes, etc. There's a lot of datapoints that you can use or you can find reliable people and rely on their judgments. Also, if you're simply looking for investment, you can't go wrong with BTC/ETH portfolio, they have been proven to work over many years now and most of the remaining altcoins are correlated with them in price anyways.
fossuser 5y ago
The stuff I linked above I thought was good. Unfortunately, as is becoming more and more true in our pretty weird modern inter-connected world there's no substitute for getting your own hands dirty, reading primary sources and trying to understand what's true and what's bullshit yourself. Only then can you really evaluate who is worth listening to and what is actually interesting (I found the above stuff I linked to be good, but you should judge them for yourself). The 'investment' bit is kind of secondary (https://soliditylang.org/ https://soliditylang.org/), I personally think BTC, ETH, and Coinbase stock are the main long term bets - other stuff has extreme risk and requires a lot of attention to know if it's worthwhile or not. I do think the ZCash privacy model is cool. Basically, I wouldn't invest unless you're going to sort through the nonsense yourself. Though like any investing the stuff where the value is harder to see is also where the bigger returns are (and the bigger failures).
doggosphere 5y ago
You stay away from the moonshots and stick to proven chains with users, transactions, and development.

root_axis 5y ago

DeFi is terrible. I spent a lot of effort digging into the DeFi ecosystem but it's either scams or pointless. I've seen one or two interesting ideas like e.g. these decentralized hedge fund things, but 100% of them are money losers relative to just holding eth - and that's without factoring in all the wasted money in gas fees. DeFi is DOA.

rawtxapp 5y ago
Maker is pretty useful for getting collateralized loans, compound is pretty useful for generating yield by lending to others, uniswap is freaking amazing as a dex and you can trade anything by creating liquidity pools without permission, aave is very useful for arbitraging market inefficiencies away risk-free, so on and on. Gas fees are going to become minimal with layer 2. If you dig enough, you'll see a lot of very useful and important projects being built by some very capable engineers. This kind of comment reminds me of when people were predicting that internet was going to be a useless thing[1]. 1: https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306 https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...
fossuser 5y ago
To me this is like complaining about webvan in the 90s and missing the forest through the trees. DAOs, and AMMs are interesting - there's a lot of potential in leveraging DeFi to make systems that can work in ways better than existing legacy tech, it's just hard and people don't have it already figured out to the point where looking at it makes it obvious. General public state is a new thing and how it can be used is being figured out (oracles, programmable money, etc.). When something is new it looks more 'pointless' and toy-like. It takes a while for its value to become truly obvious to everyone (and it requires some people to see that value early).
arcticbull 5y ago
DeFi is broadly speaking a decentralized 2008. The leverage and liquidations are IMO part of the reason for the magnitude of the draw-down in the last month, and why there's a lot more room to the downside. There's reasons why we have regulations and laws governing investment. Because without them we had the Great Depression. I believe the great financial speed-run has hit Mid-1929. Before the Securities Act, Securities Exchange Act, Regulation S and Regulation T, before the SEC, CFTC and FDIC. A world of unrestricted margin, wildcat banks, hucksters, shills, snake-oil salesmen, and some, I assume, are good people. Crypto is what the stock market would look like if everyone at the SEC decided to take a few months vacation at once, a financial version of The Purge.