15 ms·

Crypto Winter, or Crypto Ice Age?

67 points by AndrewDucker 4y ago

jqpabc123 4y ago
Crypto is a system of perfect logic built on the foundation of a few flawed assumptions. Relying on YouTube videos that anyone can create is highly suspect and should be easily recognized as a logical discrepancy/potential fallacy by otherwise intelligent technical people. The fact that it is not points out a huge hole in their education, reasoning and thinking process. It is the end result of being highly trained but poorly educated in my opinion. Quite simply, many crypto cultists failed to grasp the overall limits of their own knowledge and control and paid a heavy price for it.
somewhereoutth 4y ago
Cryptaceous Extinction Event. Hopefully anything that makes it through will actually be beneficial to the world.
noasaservice 4y ago
Hopefully crypto earth-destroying-comet.
lucideer 4y ago
Bitcoin is absolute garbage and in theory any critique is good, but it bothers me that half of the points in this article aren't even internally logically consistent: > “Blockchain is just like the early internet”. No, it isn’t. Satoshi Nakamoto’s paper was published in October 2008 ... <proceeds to compare age of Bitcoin to the age of some modern tech corps>. Nothing about the original statement is predicated on the age of the tech. Even if it did, I don't see what modern tech corps have to do with anything - they didn't build the internet. Also, on age, the early internet dates back to the 60s and was still considered "early" 30+ years later. > There are centralisation and technical problems with these solutions, but let’s ignore those for now, and call these systems for what they are. Second layers act as a reminder that the original networks cannot scale, and need a second network on top of the network to operate. This is an admission of failure. If we ignore the technical problems, 2nd-layer seem like a practical solution to a problem. Why is that a failure? (now I know that they DO have technical problems - so maybe let's talk about those specifically, instead of making weird nonsensical statements) > “Bitcoin is digital gold”. It isn’t, gold is gold, it requires no maintenance fee, once it’s mined [...] Bitcoin [...] need to be maintained by miners using electricity [...] at least to keep the mining running. Why is mining excluded for gold and not for Bitcoin in your analogy? --- As for my own opinions... > Concluding, will crypto die? This is two questions: 1. Will the crypto market die? Hopefully, though I'm less than optimistic. 2. Will blockchain tech die? Of course not. It's not very useful but it has niche applications - there's plenty of obscure tech that's kept around by enthusiasts, so I think we can be sure that even after the last cryptobro is bankrupted, there'll still be a group of geeks somewhere hacking on the blockchain for fun.
- snarfy 4y ago
  Crypto is basically gambling, and gambling is alive and well. This is why I don't see crypto dying anytime soon. It will die when a better gamble comes along.
  - asdajksah2123 4y ago
    Crypto in its current form is worse than gambling. With gambling, unless it's illegally rigged, you know your expected value will be say $0.90 for every $1 you put in. However, in return, there is a possibility that you may have a one in million chance of getting back $100 for the $1 you put in. Crypto, on the other hand, is a Ponzi scheme. It has no internal value and the current owners of crypto are paid entirely through the money brought in by the future owners of crypto. Now, to be completely fair, I don't think the majority of crypto backers perceive it as a Ponzi scheme. There were many people working in the space (maybe even the overwhelming majority, although that's unlikely to be true anymore), who actually believed that Bitcoin had real value because it could become a real currency. Similarly, there are people who actually believe that Smart Contracts, and NFTs are actual useful technologies. The problem, however, is that (a) none of those technologies have panned out, possibly because blockchain simply does not solve the problems people actually face...it solves the problem of "What if the entity who owns the database we are recording our transactions in is unreliable". In practice, this does not seem to be a major problem at all, and further, blockchain appears to be a terrible way to solve this problem. (b) Even if the technologies are useful, the limited tokens and the fact that they are largely hoarded by early adopters, simply serves to enrich those early adopters, which drastically reduces the utility of any crypto based technologies for future users, the ones who are actually using the technology. Crypto tokens are an implicit tax on technology. It would be like if Google was invented, but to use Google you necessarily had to pay $0.10 every search, but that cost is ridiculously dynamic, often jumping up to $1/search as well. Google would never take off and it would impose an insane tax on everyone else, and society as a whole. The latter is why crypto in its current form isn't just a successful/unsuccessful tech, its an actively society damaging technology.
    - landemva 4y ago
mypastself 4y ago
Sure, “blockchain is just like the early internet” is a bad argument, and one that’s used by some proponents. But if you give it a more charitable interpretation, such as “Not all successful technology is widely adopted within a decade of its inception”, it’s not quite as easy to knock down. Even VR went through (is still going through?) a long winter. The rest of the points are in a similar vein, picking the worst, most literal interpretations of the arguments. Of course only gold is gold, the argument is that Bitcoin might be used as reserve currency.
stephc_int13 4y ago
This is all very simple in practice, the blockchain is barely useful, crypto coins and NFTs have very low utility. At some point value and utility always converge. A good heuristic to predict the value of something: would you get them if they were free of charge? The only difficult thing is to predict when the convergence occurs. The asymptotic value of Bitcoin is $0.
- deepu256 4y ago
  "This is all very simple in practice, the blockchain is barely useful, crypto coins and NFTs have very low utility" Yes. FOR NOW. But public decentralised blockchains have interesting properties (enabling ownership , Liquidity , composability) and lots of smart people are trying to use those properties to build interesting apps. These apps are not there yet. I am optimistic that some good apps will be launched in next few years that make use of those unique properties enabled by decentralised public blockchains.
  - blueflow 4y ago
    These properties aren't unique, they can be achieved using regular asymmetric cryptography. For like, 45 years now.
    - deepu256 4y ago
      Ok, then show me a credible 3rd Party where I can store my ownership data apart from Government. (Most corporations which currently store my data proved that they cannot be trusted and they only look after their shareholders. Not users.)
      - p4bl0 4y ago
        > show me a credible 3rd Party where I can store my ownership data apart from Government Your "ownership data" does not have any intrinsic value. It only has value because an external authority (your Government's justice institutions) is able to enforce it. Writing something on a blockchain has no magical effect. You cannot remove necessary third-parties like that. > Most corporations which currently store my data proved that they cannot be trusted and they only look after their shareholders. Not users. True, but unrelated.
jonfw 4y ago
crypto climate change
axg11 4y ago
I live in Canada and recently invested a small amount in a startup via AngelList RUV. There were two funding options: (1) wire transfer, (2) transfer USDC via Ethereum network. One of these options is cheaper, faster, and more flexible than the other. Crypto has long been criticized for being gambling and lacking utility. I think utility is finally trickling in, although currently in limited settings. If you look at _all_ of crypto from afar, there is a lot of noise and bullshit. If you zoom into the right applications, there are use cases that are gaining product market fit.
- fabian2k 4y ago
  There are probably large differences between countries here, but for me a wire transfer would clearly be the cheaper and easier option. They don't cost anything in fees. Speed is not that great, but usually good enough. Another option that is often very convenient is the "Lastschrift", I can simply grant a company permission to withdraw money from my account. The protections for the customer are very strong with this, I can revert any withdrawal without any reason, so this is essentially no risk for me.
- pavlov 4y ago
  Wire transfers in North America are literally 40 years behind the evolution of bank transfers in EU and UK. Sending money in Europe is free and increasingly often instantaneous 24/7. It will be very difficult for crypto to reach the level of convenience available on unified infrastructure created through sensible regulation. Lacking that, maybe Americans will have to keep settling for all these clunky, incompatible intermediated patchwork solutions like Zelle and Venmo and USDC-on-Ethereum and whatever.
  - xur17 4y ago
    > Sending money in Europe is free and increasingly often instantaneous 24/7. It will be very difficult for crypto to reach the level of convenience available on unified infrastructure created through sensible regulation. Lacking that, maybe Americans will have to keep settling for all these clunky, incompatible intermediated patchwork solutions like Zelle and Venmo and USDC-on-Ethereum and whatever. While true, I do think there is value in a permissionless protocol that anyone can plug into like this. Anyone in the world can send USDC to someone else (and any bank can integrate with this). The same can't be said for banking systems.
SkyMarshal 4y ago
Bitcoin has lost more than 80% of its value at least four times in its short 10yr existence. It, and all other crypto, are highly volatile. Every time they go through one of these stages, people publish articles like these, asking if this time is the end. But the builders just keep building, advancing the tech and extending its capabilities. Largely because cryptocurrencies are a fascinating engineering problem, which combine cryptography and distributed systems in a way never done before, and which also incorporate programming language theory, networking, computer and network security, economics, and law into the mix. It’s one of the most multi-disciplinary technologies there is. Like catnip for engineers, they just can’t stop building this stuff.
- throwoutway 4y ago
  Well there has always been a supply of victims (err investors*, but after the last two crashes , what if the well has ran dry?
  - gota 4y ago
    Right. The real measure is not % of loss from top-value, rather it should be # of people that both don't understand the technology & have lost money speculating on it (i.e. how many people bought into hype and got burned) There's a finite amount of people to buy-in next cycle
    - beernet 4y ago
      Is this 2018? The comments are the same. Not a crypto head but nay sayers will be nay sayers. Kinda disappointing
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > Is this 2018? Nope [1]. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS
        4y ago
Tao3300 4y ago
Heat death of the metaverse
bannedbybros 4y ago
drdrek 4y ago
Saddest thing about Crypto even more than the energy cost is the human minds it consumed. I heard people saying that Crypto is what bright graduate students want to focus on and that just too bad. If you want to finance the un-financed or create decentralized finance go into fintech, crypto is just a bad implementation of fintech... If you want to change the world go into Biotech or Energy tech.. the next thing to change humanity is probably a better battery not a better foreign exchange market... And if you just want to get rich by taking money from fools I would recommend setting up an online casino, there are companies that sell white labeled platforms for online casinos and those extract money from poor people with 10th of the cost to the rest of humanity and takes way less effort to set up! First result in google, not an endorsement [1] https://www.softswiss.com/white-label-solution/ https://www.softswiss.com/white-label-solution/
- sshine 4y ago
  "Too many smart people go into finance and law." said some electric car manufacturer.
- mountainriver 4y ago
  Yeah it’s not really solving many problems, more people should go into AI, that’s where all the impact will be
- anony23 4y ago
  Crypto IS a subset of fintech.
  - skyyler 4y ago
    Yes, the comment you're replying to said that it is a bad implementation of fintech.
- whatisweb3 4y ago
  > the human minds it consumed oh no, engineers will start to talk about cryptography, privacy preservation, zero-knowledge proofs, distributed systems, Sybil resistance, game theory - instead of talking about the next hot frontend framework. /s Centralized exchanges may be consuming minds - like those people who have only ever interacted with crypto through buying a shitcoin on Coinbase and hoping it will go up next week, and think they have a good understanding of what crypto and the blockchain is.
sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago
> The current crash (...) What I keep coming back to is that something worth zero is still trading at $20k.
- sshine 4y ago
  s/worth/that I value being worth/ :-) If you want to make a private purchase online, not tied to your identity, I really don't see a good alternative.
heckelson 4y ago
I imagine it to be extremely difficult to remain unbiased in a dissertation about a technology when you yourself are financially reliant on that technology.
bluepoint 4y ago
> Concluding, will crypto die? Not likely, these things are like vampires, they seem to always rise up again from the dead. A bit off topic but I would like to read more examples of technological vampires or zombies!
rafaelero 4y ago
If the author didn't bother to mention central banks, monetary policy or currency debasement in the article, I don't think he quite gets the real value of Bitcoin.
- quonn 4y ago
  So there was never a way to invest money before? Such as buying gold, stock, bonds, real estate or natural resources such as oil?
  - rafaelero 4y ago
    None of these have the needed properties to act like currency.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Crypto isn’t going to die until human greed dies. VCs are pouring money into this space. Do they care about adoption? Nope. They know that this largely unregulated, liquidity challenged space that’s too technically complex for the average rube is the perfect ground to make wild, wild returns. Unless something changes drastically on the regulation front, the story will repeat itself. VCs and early adopters will buy tokens in the “ice age”. Come next cycle, the media will start hyping up crypto again, bringing the retail rubes pouring in. And then the VCs and early adopters will walk away with their 50x returns, leaving retail with the bags
ETH_start 4y ago
>>Second layers act as a reminder that the original networks cannot scale, and need a second network on top of the network to operate. This is an admission of failure. That is not argument against cryptocurrency. It is just a recognition that the first implementations had shortcomings that could be improved upon. The internet did not emerge in the 1970s/80s with the functionality it has now. >>Nope, I would love for a decentralized system to emerge, I’ve been an advocate of decentralization for 20 years. But crypto ain’t it. It’s highly centralized, and it has a propensity for inequality that makes capitalist economies look like anarchist communes. I don't buy it. A truly decentralized system cannot be censored. It enables exactly the kind of free-for-all that the author criticized it for back in 2011. [1] The author wants centralized regulatory gatekeeping and control, without calling it that. This is the case with most of the avowed opponents (as opposed to mere skeptics) of cryptocurrency. [1] https://twitter.com/technollama/status/83187937738625024 https://twitter.com/technollama/status/83187937738625024

67 points by AndrewDucker 4y ago

Crypto is a system of perfect logic built on the foundation of a few flawed assumptions. Relying on YouTube videos that anyone can create is highly suspect and should be easily recognized as a logical discrepancy/potential fallacy by otherwise intelligent technical people. The fact that it is not points out a huge hole in their education, reasoning and thinking process. It is the end result of being highly trained but poorly educated in my opinion. Quite simply, many crypto cultists failed to grasp the overall limits of their own knowledge and control and paid a heavy price for it.

somewhereoutth 4y ago

Cryptaceous Extinction Event. Hopefully anything that makes it through will actually be beneficial to the world.

noasaservice 4y ago

Hopefully crypto earth-destroying-comet.

lucideer 4y ago

Bitcoin is absolute garbage and in theory any critique is good, but it bothers me that half of the points in this article aren't even internally logically consistent: > “Blockchain is just like the early internet”. No, it isn’t. Satoshi Nakamoto’s paper was published in October 2008 ... <proceeds to compare age of Bitcoin to the age of some modern tech corps>. Nothing about the original statement is predicated on the age of the tech. Even if it did, I don't see what modern tech corps have to do with anything - they didn't build the internet. Also, on age, the early internet dates back to the 60s and was still considered "early" 30+ years later. > There are centralisation and technical problems with these solutions, but let’s ignore those for now, and call these systems for what they are. Second layers act as a reminder that the original networks cannot scale, and need a second network on top of the network to operate. This is an admission of failure. If we ignore the technical problems, 2nd-layer seem like a practical solution to a problem. Why is that a failure? (now I know that they DO have technical problems - so maybe let's talk about those specifically, instead of making weird nonsensical statements) > “Bitcoin is digital gold”. It isn’t, gold is gold, it requires no maintenance fee, once it’s mined [...] Bitcoin [...] need to be maintained by miners using electricity [...] at least to keep the mining running. Why is mining excluded for gold and not for Bitcoin in your analogy? --- As for my own opinions... > Concluding, will crypto die? This is two questions: 1. Will the crypto market die? Hopefully, though I'm less than optimistic. 2. Will blockchain tech die? Of course not. It's not very useful but it has niche applications - there's plenty of obscure tech that's kept around by enthusiasts, so I think we can be sure that even after the last cryptobro is bankrupted, there'll still be a group of geeks somewhere hacking on the blockchain for fun.

snarfy 4y ago
Crypto is basically gambling, and gambling is alive and well. This is why I don't see crypto dying anytime soon. It will die when a better gamble comes along.
- asdajksah2123 4y ago
  Crypto in its current form is worse than gambling. With gambling, unless it's illegally rigged, you know your expected value will be say $0.90 for every $1 you put in. However, in return, there is a possibility that you may have a one in million chance of getting back $100 for the $1 you put in. Crypto, on the other hand, is a Ponzi scheme. It has no internal value and the current owners of crypto are paid entirely through the money brought in by the future owners of crypto. Now, to be completely fair, I don't think the majority of crypto backers perceive it as a Ponzi scheme. There were many people working in the space (maybe even the overwhelming majority, although that's unlikely to be true anymore), who actually believed that Bitcoin had real value because it could become a real currency. Similarly, there are people who actually believe that Smart Contracts, and NFTs are actual useful technologies. The problem, however, is that (a) none of those technologies have panned out, possibly because blockchain simply does not solve the problems people actually face...it solves the problem of "What if the entity who owns the database we are recording our transactions in is unreliable". In practice, this does not seem to be a major problem at all, and further, blockchain appears to be a terrible way to solve this problem. (b) Even if the technologies are useful, the limited tokens and the fact that they are largely hoarded by early adopters, simply serves to enrich those early adopters, which drastically reduces the utility of any crypto based technologies for future users, the ones who are actually using the technology. Crypto tokens are an implicit tax on technology. It would be like if Google was invented, but to use Google you necessarily had to pay $0.10 every search, but that cost is ridiculously dynamic, often jumping up to $1/search as well. Google would never take off and it would impose an insane tax on everyone else, and society as a whole. The latter is why crypto in its current form isn't just a successful/unsuccessful tech, its an actively society damaging technology.
  - landemva 4y ago

mypastself 4y ago

Sure, “blockchain is just like the early internet” is a bad argument, and one that’s used by some proponents. But if you give it a more charitable interpretation, such as “Not all successful technology is widely adopted within a decade of its inception”, it’s not quite as easy to knock down. Even VR went through (is still going through?) a long winter. The rest of the points are in a similar vein, picking the worst, most literal interpretations of the arguments. Of course only gold is gold, the argument is that Bitcoin might be used as reserve currency.

stephc_int13 4y ago

This is all very simple in practice, the blockchain is barely useful, crypto coins and NFTs have very low utility. At some point value and utility always converge. A good heuristic to predict the value of something: would you get them if they were free of charge? The only difficult thing is to predict when the convergence occurs. The asymptotic value of Bitcoin is $0.

deepu256 4y ago
"This is all very simple in practice, the blockchain is barely useful, crypto coins and NFTs have very low utility" Yes. FOR NOW. But public decentralised blockchains have interesting properties (enabling ownership , Liquidity , composability) and lots of smart people are trying to use those properties to build interesting apps. These apps are not there yet. I am optimistic that some good apps will be launched in next few years that make use of those unique properties enabled by decentralised public blockchains.
- blueflow 4y ago
  These properties aren't unique, they can be achieved using regular asymmetric cryptography. For like, 45 years now.
  - deepu256 4y ago
    Ok, then show me a credible 3rd Party where I can store my ownership data apart from Government. (Most corporations which currently store my data proved that they cannot be trusted and they only look after their shareholders. Not users.)
    - p4bl0 4y ago
      > show me a credible 3rd Party where I can store my ownership data apart from Government Your "ownership data" does not have any intrinsic value. It only has value because an external authority (your Government's justice institutions) is able to enforce it. Writing something on a blockchain has no magical effect. You cannot remove necessary third-parties like that. > Most corporations which currently store my data proved that they cannot be trusted and they only look after their shareholders. Not users. True, but unrelated.

jonfw 4y ago

crypto climate change

axg11 4y ago

I live in Canada and recently invested a small amount in a startup via AngelList RUV. There were two funding options: (1) wire transfer, (2) transfer USDC via Ethereum network. One of these options is cheaper, faster, and more flexible than the other. Crypto has long been criticized for being gambling and lacking utility. I think utility is finally trickling in, although currently in limited settings. If you look at _all_ of crypto from afar, there is a lot of noise and bullshit. If you zoom into the right applications, there are use cases that are gaining product market fit.

fabian2k 4y ago
There are probably large differences between countries here, but for me a wire transfer would clearly be the cheaper and easier option. They don't cost anything in fees. Speed is not that great, but usually good enough. Another option that is often very convenient is the "Lastschrift", I can simply grant a company permission to withdraw money from my account. The protections for the customer are very strong with this, I can revert any withdrawal without any reason, so this is essentially no risk for me.
pavlov 4y ago
Wire transfers in North America are literally 40 years behind the evolution of bank transfers in EU and UK. Sending money in Europe is free and increasingly often instantaneous 24/7. It will be very difficult for crypto to reach the level of convenience available on unified infrastructure created through sensible regulation. Lacking that, maybe Americans will have to keep settling for all these clunky, incompatible intermediated patchwork solutions like Zelle and Venmo and USDC-on-Ethereum and whatever.
- xur17 4y ago
  > Sending money in Europe is free and increasingly often instantaneous 24/7. It will be very difficult for crypto to reach the level of convenience available on unified infrastructure created through sensible regulation. Lacking that, maybe Americans will have to keep settling for all these clunky, incompatible intermediated patchwork solutions like Zelle and Venmo and USDC-on-Ethereum and whatever. While true, I do think there is value in a permissionless protocol that anyone can plug into like this. Anyone in the world can send USDC to someone else (and any bank can integrate with this). The same can't be said for banking systems.

SkyMarshal 4y ago

Bitcoin has lost more than 80% of its value at least four times in its short 10yr existence. It, and all other crypto, are highly volatile. Every time they go through one of these stages, people publish articles like these, asking if this time is the end. But the builders just keep building, advancing the tech and extending its capabilities. Largely because cryptocurrencies are a fascinating engineering problem, which combine cryptography and distributed systems in a way never done before, and which also incorporate programming language theory, networking, computer and network security, economics, and law into the mix. It’s one of the most multi-disciplinary technologies there is. Like catnip for engineers, they just can’t stop building this stuff.

throwoutway 4y ago
Well there has always been a supply of victims (err investors*, but after the last two crashes , what if the well has ran dry?
- gota 4y ago
  Right. The real measure is not % of loss from top-value, rather it should be # of people that both don't understand the technology & have lost money speculating on it (i.e. how many people bought into hype and got burned) There's a finite amount of people to buy-in next cycle
  - beernet 4y ago
    Is this 2018? The comments are the same. Not a crypto head but nay sayers will be nay sayers. Kinda disappointing
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > Is this 2018? Nope [1]. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS
      - 4y ago

Tao3300 4y ago

Heat death of the metaverse

bannedbybros 4y ago

drdrek 4y ago

Saddest thing about Crypto even more than the energy cost is the human minds it consumed. I heard people saying that Crypto is what bright graduate students want to focus on and that just too bad. If you want to finance the un-financed or create decentralized finance go into fintech, crypto is just a bad implementation of fintech... If you want to change the world go into Biotech or Energy tech.. the next thing to change humanity is probably a better battery not a better foreign exchange market... And if you just want to get rich by taking money from fools I would recommend setting up an online casino, there are companies that sell white labeled platforms for online casinos and those extract money from poor people with 10th of the cost to the rest of humanity and takes way less effort to set up! First result in google, not an endorsement [1] https://www.softswiss.com/white-label-solution/ https://www.softswiss.com/white-label-solution/

sshine 4y ago
"Too many smart people go into finance and law." said some electric car manufacturer.
mountainriver 4y ago
Yeah it’s not really solving many problems, more people should go into AI, that’s where all the impact will be
anony23 4y ago
Crypto IS a subset of fintech.
- skyyler 4y ago
  Yes, the comment you're replying to said that it is a bad implementation of fintech.
whatisweb3 4y ago
> the human minds it consumed oh no, engineers will start to talk about cryptography, privacy preservation, zero-knowledge proofs, distributed systems, Sybil resistance, game theory - instead of talking about the next hot frontend framework. /s Centralized exchanges may be consuming minds - like those people who have only ever interacted with crypto through buying a shitcoin on Coinbase and hoping it will go up next week, and think they have a good understanding of what crypto and the blockchain is.

sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago

> The current crash (...) What I keep coming back to is that something worth zero is still trading at $20k.

sshine 4y ago
s/worth/that I value being worth/ :-) If you want to make a private purchase online, not tied to your identity, I really don't see a good alternative.

heckelson 4y ago

I imagine it to be extremely difficult to remain unbiased in a dissertation about a technology when you yourself are financially reliant on that technology.

bluepoint 4y ago

> Concluding, will crypto die? Not likely, these things are like vampires, they seem to always rise up again from the dead. A bit off topic but I would like to read more examples of technological vampires or zombies!

rafaelero 4y ago

If the author didn't bother to mention central banks, monetary policy or currency debasement in the article, I don't think he quite gets the real value of Bitcoin.

quonn 4y ago
So there was never a way to invest money before? Such as buying gold, stock, bonds, real estate or natural resources such as oil?
- rafaelero 4y ago
  None of these have the needed properties to act like currency.

spaceman_2020 4y ago

Crypto isn’t going to die until human greed dies. VCs are pouring money into this space. Do they care about adoption? Nope. They know that this largely unregulated, liquidity challenged space that’s too technically complex for the average rube is the perfect ground to make wild, wild returns. Unless something changes drastically on the regulation front, the story will repeat itself. VCs and early adopters will buy tokens in the “ice age”. Come next cycle, the media will start hyping up crypto again, bringing the retail rubes pouring in. And then the VCs and early adopters will walk away with their 50x returns, leaving retail with the bags

ETH_start 4y ago

>>Second layers act as a reminder that the original networks cannot scale, and need a second network on top of the network to operate. This is an admission of failure. That is not argument against cryptocurrency. It is just a recognition that the first implementations had shortcomings that could be improved upon. The internet did not emerge in the 1970s/80s with the functionality it has now. >>Nope, I would love for a decentralized system to emerge, I’ve been an advocate of decentralization for 20 years. But crypto ain’t it. It’s highly centralized, and it has a propensity for inequality that makes capitalist economies look like anarchist communes. I don't buy it. A truly decentralized system cannot be censored. It enables exactly the kind of free-for-all that the author criticized it for back in 2011. [1] The author wants centralized regulatory gatekeeping and control, without calling it that. This is the case with most of the avowed opponents (as opposed to mere skeptics) of cryptocurrency. [1] https://twitter.com/technollama/status/83187937738625024 https://twitter.com/technollama/status/83187937738625024