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I feel bad for people losing money, but crypto has not lived up to its potential at all, remains a solution looking for a problem, and is an environmental disas

I feel bad for people losing money, but crypto has not lived up to its potential at all, remains a solution looking for a problem, and is an environmental disaster. I used to be a huge believer. Brian Armstrong gave me my first Bitcoin in 2011 at District in SOMA. Electricity was included in my rent so I bought 10 video cards and mined for about two years on 5 systems. At a company I founded, I use Bitcoin to pay for food and drinks. According to the Barista, I was the first person to ever pay for coffee with Bitcoin at Coupa Cafe (despite having to stand there and wait 10 minutes while the transaction cleared). But nothing has come of it. All the years of promises and applications, nothing. Ether DApps, sure, but how much of the modern internet runs on those? I also mined StorJ and Monero for years. Apart from a way of making money and storing value, crypto is useless. Processing fees are way too high to even be considered as a replacement for payments not to mention other barriers such as the ability to integrate with antiquated point of sale systems entirely designed around credit/debit and cash. So I put all of my holdings into a retirement account and don't worry about the price. But I've given up on crypto and everyone who babbles on endlessly like they know something I don't about how it's going to change the world. So even if Crypto loses its value some, I'm glad because the lack of easy, effortless gains will disappear for a lot of those people and most of these short term hucksters will fade away. I'll gladly exchange crypto's price for less crypto bros. My cost basis is around $150 so I have a long ways to go before I care that much.

Avalaxy 4y ago
Im in the same boat. Started with bitcoin in 2013, bought ethereum in the presale, did freelance app development for all sorts of crypto startups (including coinbase). Was a true believer in the technique. But over the years it became clear it was never going to have a big impact. We went from people armiring the tech, to people with no knowledge about the tech, but with big dollar signs in their eyes. Then in 2016 I decided to sell all my crypto coins and move on to a different field. In hindsight, I lost out on millions. But ah well, cant forsee the future. Those crypto bros who think they can are just deluded. What theyre doing was never any better than gambling.
- tombert 4y ago
  My uncle used to brag about how good of a blackjack player by talking about how he would win enough to pay off the cruise he was gambling on. We never had the heart to tell him that all that does is prove that he got lucky; professional blackjack players only average a return of 3-5% profit. That's how I feel about the crypto (and to a lesser extent stock) bros. The future is unknowable, and even people who trade these thing professionally make fairly marginal gains (that they make up for in quantity); saying you made millions from bitcoin just says "this guy got really lucky!".
  - hutzlibu 4y ago
    "We never had the heart to tell him that all that does is prove that he got lucky; professional blackjack players only average a return of 3-5% profit." I would say, that depends who they are playing against?
    - tombert 4y ago
      Sure, it's an average. They lose big on some hands, and win big on others, hopefully winning a bit more than losing. My understanding is that it's a volume-business.
    - daveed 4y ago
      Not in blackjack, you're playing against the house.
      - hutzlibu 4y ago
        Yeah, I confused the game.
- Breza 4y ago
  I sold out in 2017 after seeing Bitcoin on CNBC for the first time. I figured that meant the dream was over.
llanowarelves 4y ago
Do you know of any other way to send electronic cash with no intermediaries (EDIT: financial institutions)? It's the first sentence of the whitepaper and ignored by 99% of people, including highly paid software developers. Whether or not you need that will depend on where the world goes. A CDBC social-credit system world presents a lot of incentives to use something else. And if you do need it, you need it ahead of time. Good luck trying to learn and set up networks from scratch when they are considered illegal etc.
- judge2020 4y ago
  > Do you know of any other way to send electronic cash with no intermediaries? Well, you rely on a bunch of intermediaries, but the profit incentive outweighs the power of any large (but still minority) intermediary blocking specific transactions at will.
  - llanowarelves 4y ago
    Good point, I meant financial institutions, which is actually the term used in the whitepaper, not intermediaries.
- FabHK 4y ago
  > with no intermediaries? You're connecting to some nodes, right, to send the transaction? Those are intermediaries. Very very few holders of crypto run their own nodes, these days.
  - Breza 4y ago
    This is something I've been wondering about lately. People still talk about the blockchain, but how relevant is the blockchain anymore? It seems like most people never directly interact with it.
  - llanowarelves 4y ago
    I meant financial institutions but you are correct yes
- 4y ago
timdiggerm 4y ago
By "potential" do you mean "potential stated by crypto investors & startup founders" or like...something more objective?
- bobsmooth 4y ago
  "potential" like a decentralized currency as Satoshi imagined.
NotAnEnemy 4y ago
I will probably trade my karma for this comment, but have you looked into other protocols ? You mention the processing fees and the finality time, I've heard of several projects that are already better than Ethereum on this such as Hedera Hashgraph, Avalanche or Algorand. Saying that "crypto has not lived up to its potential at all" merely 12 years after Satoshi mined the first bitcoin is laughable if anything. It took 15 years of the internet to have Facebook. It took 27 years (!!) of the internet to have something like TikTok. How can you say that crypto will amount to nothing ?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- giantrobot 4y ago
  > It took 15 years of the internet to have Facebook. It took 27 years (!!) of the internet to have something like TikTok. That's an amazingly ridiculous statement. There's been bulletin boards and chat on the Internet about as long as it has existed. All manner of utility has existed on the Internet since the beginning. Neither Facebook nor TikTok were required for the Internet to be useful. The best uses for cryptocurrency are speculation and crime. Even the speculation requires some amount of criminality because speculators only get a payout if more rubes "invest".
ordinaryradical 4y ago
This is a great perspective and I largely agree with it. There needs to be a "return to sanity" market-wide. That said, regarding your perspective on crypto's limited utility, I just want to point out there's a crypto few folks have paid attention to which actually addresses your issues head-on: Nano is a feeless and PoW-less crypto which has been around for a few years and was started by one of the early contributors to Bitcoin. Nano is not a "hot coin." It's seen little market speculation and it's not programmable and riding the smart contract wave; it does one thing well: transacting. It's free (as in truly and completely free, fee-less, zero cost), near-instant (<1 second transactions/validations), and green a(~0.1Wh per transaction, or for context about 1/6 millionth of the energy cost of a single Bitcoin transaction). It's also decentralized, without being mined/staked, so it's not controlled according to the interests of miners/whales. This seems to me the holy grail, so I'm always surprised that discussions of crypto on HN don't mention it or even that that veterans like yourself don't seem to know about it. Maybe it's still too young/obscure? But I think it will see significant interest post-crash as it fulfills the initial promise of crypto—it's money you can by a coffee with, send across borders at zero cost, make micro-micro payments with, etc... you know, like real money, just better.
- honkdaddy 4y ago
  But it's not money you can buy coffee with... In April it spiked up to more than 5x what it's trading at now. In the last few weeks it seems to be trending down, isn't this just as speculative as any other coin?
  - ordinaryradical 4y ago
    It will need to become more stable, certainly, but I think that's a function of how the market interacts with it. If the majority of Nano is being priced based on speculation through exchanges, it will continue to have this kind of volatility. But if money continues to enter the system via other use-cases, aka its actual utility, volatility will diminish. Pricing becomes less about speculating on it as an asset and more about utility as a means of transaction. The reason you don't see this with other cryptos, by the way, is that their utility is severely limited (in a technical sense) and therefore the underlying value is entirely speculative.
conductr 4y ago
I agree with this. I hate that I actually tried to use bitcoin as currency. My first transaction, I bought a bag of weed on silkroad early enough on that those coins would be worth ~$1m right now. But I smoked it.
- gsibble 4y ago
  Hey, you can say you were rich enough to smoke a million dollars. There's some street cred to that.
yunohn 4y ago
> I'll gladly exchange crypto's price for less crypto bros. My cost basis is around $150 so I have a long ways to go before I care that much. This entire viewpoint made a lot of sense until this final sentence. Your point is that you’re okay the market crashed because your cost basis is 150$ and BTC is still at 28.5k$?
timtas 4y ago
> remains a solution looking for a problem > Apart from a way of ... storing value Do you think USD (or some other fiat) is a good medium for storing value? If not, can you see that your latter claim invalidates the former?

Avalaxy 4y ago

Im in the same boat. Started with bitcoin in 2013, bought ethereum in the presale, did freelance app development for all sorts of crypto startups (including coinbase). Was a true believer in the technique. But over the years it became clear it was never going to have a big impact. We went from people armiring the tech, to people with no knowledge about the tech, but with big dollar signs in their eyes. Then in 2016 I decided to sell all my crypto coins and move on to a different field. In hindsight, I lost out on millions. But ah well, cant forsee the future. Those crypto bros who think they can are just deluded. What theyre doing was never any better than gambling.

tombert 4y ago
My uncle used to brag about how good of a blackjack player by talking about how he would win enough to pay off the cruise he was gambling on. We never had the heart to tell him that all that does is prove that he got lucky; professional blackjack players only average a return of 3-5% profit. That's how I feel about the crypto (and to a lesser extent stock) bros. The future is unknowable, and even people who trade these thing professionally make fairly marginal gains (that they make up for in quantity); saying you made millions from bitcoin just says "this guy got really lucky!".
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  "We never had the heart to tell him that all that does is prove that he got lucky; professional blackjack players only average a return of 3-5% profit." I would say, that depends who they are playing against?
  - tombert 4y ago
    Sure, it's an average. They lose big on some hands, and win big on others, hopefully winning a bit more than losing. My understanding is that it's a volume-business.
  - daveed 4y ago
    Not in blackjack, you're playing against the house.
    - hutzlibu 4y ago
      Yeah, I confused the game.
Breza 4y ago
I sold out in 2017 after seeing Bitcoin on CNBC for the first time. I figured that meant the dream was over.

llanowarelves 4y ago

Do you know of any other way to send electronic cash with no intermediaries (EDIT: financial institutions)? It's the first sentence of the whitepaper and ignored by 99% of people, including highly paid software developers. Whether or not you need that will depend on where the world goes. A CDBC social-credit system world presents a lot of incentives to use something else. And if you do need it, you need it ahead of time. Good luck trying to learn and set up networks from scratch when they are considered illegal etc.

judge2020 4y ago
> Do you know of any other way to send electronic cash with no intermediaries? Well, you rely on a bunch of intermediaries, but the profit incentive outweighs the power of any large (but still minority) intermediary blocking specific transactions at will.
- llanowarelves 4y ago
  Good point, I meant financial institutions, which is actually the term used in the whitepaper, not intermediaries.
FabHK 4y ago
> with no intermediaries? You're connecting to some nodes, right, to send the transaction? Those are intermediaries. Very very few holders of crypto run their own nodes, these days.
- Breza 4y ago
  This is something I've been wondering about lately. People still talk about the blockchain, but how relevant is the blockchain anymore? It seems like most people never directly interact with it.
- llanowarelves 4y ago
  I meant financial institutions but you are correct yes
4y ago

timdiggerm 4y ago

By "potential" do you mean "potential stated by crypto investors & startup founders" or like...something more objective?

bobsmooth 4y ago
"potential" like a decentralized currency as Satoshi imagined.

NotAnEnemy 4y ago

I will probably trade my karma for this comment, but have you looked into other protocols ? You mention the processing fees and the finality time, I've heard of several projects that are already better than Ethereum on this such as Hedera Hashgraph, Avalanche or Algorand. Saying that "crypto has not lived up to its potential at all" merely 12 years after Satoshi mined the first bitcoin is laughable if anything. It took 15 years of the internet to have Facebook. It took 27 years (!!) of the internet to have something like TikTok. How can you say that crypto will amount to nothing ?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
giantrobot 4y ago
> It took 15 years of the internet to have Facebook. It took 27 years (!!) of the internet to have something like TikTok. That's an amazingly ridiculous statement. There's been bulletin boards and chat on the Internet about as long as it has existed. All manner of utility has existed on the Internet since the beginning. Neither Facebook nor TikTok were required for the Internet to be useful. The best uses for cryptocurrency are speculation and crime. Even the speculation requires some amount of criminality because speculators only get a payout if more rubes "invest".

ordinaryradical 4y ago

This is a great perspective and I largely agree with it. There needs to be a "return to sanity" market-wide. That said, regarding your perspective on crypto's limited utility, I just want to point out there's a crypto few folks have paid attention to which actually addresses your issues head-on: Nano is a feeless and PoW-less crypto which has been around for a few years and was started by one of the early contributors to Bitcoin. Nano is not a "hot coin." It's seen little market speculation and it's not programmable and riding the smart contract wave; it does one thing well: transacting. It's free (as in truly and completely free, fee-less, zero cost), near-instant (<1 second transactions/validations), and green a(~0.1Wh per transaction, or for context about 1/6 millionth of the energy cost of a single Bitcoin transaction). It's also decentralized, without being mined/staked, so it's not controlled according to the interests of miners/whales. This seems to me the holy grail, so I'm always surprised that discussions of crypto on HN don't mention it or even that that veterans like yourself don't seem to know about it. Maybe it's still too young/obscure? But I think it will see significant interest post-crash as it fulfills the initial promise of crypto—it's money you can by a coffee with, send across borders at zero cost, make micro-micro payments with, etc... you know, like real money, just better.

honkdaddy 4y ago
But it's not money you can buy coffee with... In April it spiked up to more than 5x what it's trading at now. In the last few weeks it seems to be trending down, isn't this just as speculative as any other coin?
- ordinaryradical 4y ago
  It will need to become more stable, certainly, but I think that's a function of how the market interacts with it. If the majority of Nano is being priced based on speculation through exchanges, it will continue to have this kind of volatility. But if money continues to enter the system via other use-cases, aka its actual utility, volatility will diminish. Pricing becomes less about speculating on it as an asset and more about utility as a means of transaction. The reason you don't see this with other cryptos, by the way, is that their utility is severely limited (in a technical sense) and therefore the underlying value is entirely speculative.

conductr 4y ago

I agree with this. I hate that I actually tried to use bitcoin as currency. My first transaction, I bought a bag of weed on silkroad early enough on that those coins would be worth ~$1m right now. But I smoked it.

gsibble 4y ago
Hey, you can say you were rich enough to smoke a million dollars. There's some street cred to that.

yunohn 4y ago

> I'll gladly exchange crypto's price for less crypto bros. My cost basis is around $150 so I have a long ways to go before I care that much. This entire viewpoint made a lot of sense until this final sentence. Your point is that you’re okay the market crashed because your cost basis is 150$ and BTC is still at 28.5k$?

timtas 4y ago

> remains a solution looking for a problem > Apart from a way of ... storing value Do you think USD (or some other fiat) is a good medium for storing value? If not, can you see that your latter claim invalidates the former?