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>Don't get me wrong, make as much money as you can, but do something useful. Do something people actually want or need. Don't just wantonly and reclessly exploi

>Don't get me wrong, make as much money as you can, but do something useful. Do something people actually want or need. Don't just wantonly and reclessly exploit them. Create some damn value, something your mama would be proud of. We're at a place in some circles where cryptocurrency projects and any subjective value they may provide is preemptively dismissed with prejudice. Ultimately the customer decides what he values. As tech types it is too easy to sit back and claim, "Oh these consumers don't know what they want". Perhaps that is true. Perhaps what we find useful or interesting isn't what interests consumers. If we really know what will satisfy them, then we should provide it. Knee-jerk condemnations are a bit easier.

Hjfrf 5y ago
Cryptocurrency projects have squandered a decade of good faith with no useful product. They've done a great deal of harm in that period, so I can't see even the current level of mild negative sentiment as sustainable.
- nickstinemates 5y ago
  Storj is pretty useful. But, it's definitely an exception not the norm.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - RC_ITR 5y ago
    And what's amazing is that the coin has a market cap of $450m (probably still expensive if comped to someone like Dropbox). If something with that utility is so lowly valued, then imagine the true intrinsic value of BTC!
  - Comevius 5y ago
    Storj is genuinely useful. It is however regular cloud storage, except the storage nodes that must be trusted will survive the company somehow. However the authenticated client-side encryption will protect your data, so the safety claim checks out, not sure about liveness. Slapping a decentralized sticker on and having a cryptocurrency apparently worked out for them. This is how you successfully differentiate a product.
Comevius 5y ago
I'm certainly open for suprises. There may be subjective value, but there is also fraud and exploitation. Calling it out is not wrong. I would be very interested in a16z honestly writing about the actual problems in this industry, how are they combatting them, but hype is the only language they know. They pretend that NFTs or games with token economies are utopias, because an utopia is easy to sell. They are very far from an utopia, in fact a lot of nasty things are going on with them.
- aww_dang 5y ago
  This is fair. I'm not sure about the utopia part. People talk their own book. Making exaggerated claims isn't unique to crypto. Social media as mentioned above is another good example. I don't personally see the value in something like FB, but I don't generalize or condemn social media broadly. If others want to realize value there, fine. There are also groups calling out the perceived "evils" of FB, Instagram and others. They'll go as far as blaming teen suicide on social media. One person's utopia is another's hell. Imagine looking at FB's market valuation and claiming, "There's no real value as I define it, therefore FB is worthless!". Would love to see what this person builds and how the market reacts to their personal values. Innovation, actions, speak so much louder than some of HN's condemnations.
api 5y ago
There's an easy way to win this argument. Show me where I can easily find good cryptocurrency stuff that is not: (1) Gambling (including "investing" in speculative non-corporeal assets) (2) Scams (this includes misattributed art) (3) Obvious mediocre junk created to cash in on a fad I'm sure you can dig and find a couple of examples. The problem is that you have to dig. BBSes, the Internet, and the WWW protocol were instantly useful. One did not have to dig at all to find dozens to hundreds of legitimate use cases. We are in year 14 of cryptocurrency and you have to dig to find anything that is not a scam or crap. For example here is the flagship of the NFT craze: https://opensea.io/rankings https://opensea.io/rankings It speaks for itself.
jancsika 5y ago
So why is the current definition of "cryptocurrency" so narrow? It seems to imply either a) blockchain, or b) some decentralized alternative to blockchain that tries to fill in the basic features of blockchain and one day scale it. But there must be dozens of other approaches to doing cryptocurrencies in a sane and safe manner. E.g., in all this crazy buzz, has anyone in this space tried to do an updated version of digicash? That was a digital payment system created by one of the grandfathers of modern crypto. I've never heard a counterargument to its fundamentals-- unlike Bitcoin, you got your cashlike properties of anonymity wrt the issuing back through the use of blinded signatures. And I'm pretty sure it could also scale much better than blockchain-based stuff. It just pre-dated ecommerce so it didn't have a market. There must be dozens of other non-blockchain approaches that also route around all the scaling problems of trying to do a blockchain or decentralized approach. I mean, even in the realm of anonymous messaging researchers like Len Sassman came up with remailers that could make use of some number of centralized servers without relying on them to play nice for the anonymity properties. Hell, Moxie even went full centralized and still gets what I think a lot of commenters on HN would have to admit are decent privacy properties. Or, at least better privacy options than you'd get with doing transactions through Bitcoin. Are there equivalent non-blockchain, non-decentralization-zealotry cryptocurrency experiments going on right now in this same space? If so, I'd love to know about them. If not, then it sure does look like a bunch of people either copy/pasted Bitcoin's hashcash hack or put an experimental stop-gap in there to surf atop this ocean of cash that seems to only chase this incredibly small niche.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  Digicash was centralized and thus could shut down, and it did shut down. Major blockchains are effectively immortal, with open-access rules that have enormous momentum to remain unchanged. This allows larger numbers of disparate parties to coordinate on them for financial and social interaction. I would not rely heavily on a token distributed on a centralized digicash like system but I would rely on a token my company issues on Ethereum, because I know any one receiving the tokens would still be able to access them years from now and that the infrastructure of compatible software, both client-side and blockchain-based, will only grow over time.

Hjfrf 5y ago

Cryptocurrency projects have squandered a decade of good faith with no useful product. They've done a great deal of harm in that period, so I can't see even the current level of mild negative sentiment as sustainable.

nickstinemates 5y ago
Storj is pretty useful. But, it's definitely an exception not the norm.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- RC_ITR 5y ago
  And what's amazing is that the coin has a market cap of $450m (probably still expensive if comped to someone like Dropbox). If something with that utility is so lowly valued, then imagine the true intrinsic value of BTC!
- Comevius 5y ago
  Storj is genuinely useful. It is however regular cloud storage, except the storage nodes that must be trusted will survive the company somehow. However the authenticated client-side encryption will protect your data, so the safety claim checks out, not sure about liveness. Slapping a decentralized sticker on and having a cryptocurrency apparently worked out for them. This is how you successfully differentiate a product.

Comevius 5y ago

I'm certainly open for suprises. There may be subjective value, but there is also fraud and exploitation. Calling it out is not wrong. I would be very interested in a16z honestly writing about the actual problems in this industry, how are they combatting them, but hype is the only language they know. They pretend that NFTs or games with token economies are utopias, because an utopia is easy to sell. They are very far from an utopia, in fact a lot of nasty things are going on with them.

aww_dang 5y ago
This is fair. I'm not sure about the utopia part. People talk their own book. Making exaggerated claims isn't unique to crypto. Social media as mentioned above is another good example. I don't personally see the value in something like FB, but I don't generalize or condemn social media broadly. If others want to realize value there, fine. There are also groups calling out the perceived "evils" of FB, Instagram and others. They'll go as far as blaming teen suicide on social media. One person's utopia is another's hell. Imagine looking at FB's market valuation and claiming, "There's no real value as I define it, therefore FB is worthless!". Would love to see what this person builds and how the market reacts to their personal values. Innovation, actions, speak so much louder than some of HN's condemnations.

api 5y ago

There's an easy way to win this argument. Show me where I can easily find good cryptocurrency stuff that is not: (1) Gambling (including "investing" in speculative non-corporeal assets) (2) Scams (this includes misattributed art) (3) Obvious mediocre junk created to cash in on a fad I'm sure you can dig and find a couple of examples. The problem is that you have to dig. BBSes, the Internet, and the WWW protocol were instantly useful. One did not have to dig at all to find dozens to hundreds of legitimate use cases. We are in year 14 of cryptocurrency and you have to dig to find anything that is not a scam or crap. For example here is the flagship of the NFT craze: https://opensea.io/rankings https://opensea.io/rankings It speaks for itself.

jancsika 5y ago

So why is the current definition of "cryptocurrency" so narrow? It seems to imply either a) blockchain, or b) some decentralized alternative to blockchain that tries to fill in the basic features of blockchain and one day scale it. But there must be dozens of other approaches to doing cryptocurrencies in a sane and safe manner. E.g., in all this crazy buzz, has anyone in this space tried to do an updated version of digicash? That was a digital payment system created by one of the grandfathers of modern crypto. I've never heard a counterargument to its fundamentals-- unlike Bitcoin, you got your cashlike properties of anonymity wrt the issuing back through the use of blinded signatures. And I'm pretty sure it could also scale much better than blockchain-based stuff. It just pre-dated ecommerce so it didn't have a market. There must be dozens of other non-blockchain approaches that also route around all the scaling problems of trying to do a blockchain or decentralized approach. I mean, even in the realm of anonymous messaging researchers like Len Sassman came up with remailers that could make use of some number of centralized servers without relying on them to play nice for the anonymity properties. Hell, Moxie even went full centralized and still gets what I think a lot of commenters on HN would have to admit are decent privacy properties. Or, at least better privacy options than you'd get with doing transactions through Bitcoin. Are there equivalent non-blockchain, non-decentralization-zealotry cryptocurrency experiments going on right now in this same space? If so, I'd love to know about them. If not, then it sure does look like a bunch of people either copy/pasted Bitcoin's hashcash hack or put an experimental stop-gap in there to surf atop this ocean of cash that seems to only chase this incredibly small niche.

CryptoPunk 5y ago
Digicash was centralized and thus could shut down, and it did shut down. Major blockchains are effectively immortal, with open-access rules that have enormous momentum to remain unchanged. This allows larger numbers of disparate parties to coordinate on them for financial and social interaction. I would not rely heavily on a token distributed on a centralized digicash like system but I would rely on a token my company issues on Ethereum, because I know any one receiving the tokens would still be able to access them years from now and that the infrastructure of compatible software, both client-side and blockchain-based, will only grow over time.