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People have really short memories. Circa 2000, there was a website called "fuckedcompany.com" [0] that chronicled the failing dot-coms of that era, after the d

People have really short memories. Circa 2000, there was a website called "fuckedcompany.com" [0] that chronicled the failing dot-coms of that era, after the dot-com bubble "burst". The website encapsulated the glee that people felt at pointing out what they considered stupid dot-com ideas and internet companies that failed to capitalize on what many people consider over-hyped promises. There were a lot of stupid ideas during the 2000 dot-com. There were also a lot of companies and founders that started their companies during this time that are stalwarts of the internet and general computing industry. There are a lot of bad ideas in the cryptocurrency space. There also might be a lot of good ideas. I would urge people to be a little more circumspect about cryptocurrency technologies. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

lkrubner 4y ago
Except by 2000 there were hundreds of Web companies that had become real companies. It was obvious that Google, eBay, Yahoo and Amazon would survive the downturn of 2000-2001. While there were many bad ideas, there were obviously many good ideas that had become real businesses. And this was just 7 years after Congress had change the law to allow commercial activity on the Internet. By contrast, Bitcoin is almost 15 years old, but in all this time, no one has been able to find a large-scale use for crypto, other than financial speculation and buying illegal drugs and evading national capital controls -- in other words, it remains almost entirely used for criminal activity.
- tromp 4y ago
  > other than financial speculation and buying illegal drugs and evading national capital controls -- in other words, it remains almost entirely used for criminal activity. Speculation is the main use. How is that criminal?
  - potatototoo99 4y ago
    Speculation with false pretenses, just with the purpose of defrauding investors is criminal.
  - EdwardDiego 4y ago
    Maybe not criminal, but a dependency on Greater Fools for capital gain feels immoral.
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  Speaking of Google (as one example), it went from research project to impacting daily lives (including mine as a teenager in flyover country) within two years for a couple of million dollars (max - inflation adjusted). The crypto ecosystem has had tens of billions of dollars invested in it (not to mention countless token scams, etc) over the past decade and other than people with gambling accounts on exchanges (which are internal order books and don’t touch a blockchain) there is no meaningful usage. No one with any kind of intellectual and rational honesty can compare the development of the crypto ecosystem to the internet, web, etc. Tens of billions of dollars and a decade later there still isn’t a single crypto Google.
  - jboy55 4y ago
    Looking at the dot-com era, it probably would be more likely to compare crypto to the sudden rise and collapse of the 'dark fiber' companies. https://25iq.com/2017/11/11/the-1990s-telecom-bubble-what-can-we-learn/ https://25iq.com/2017/11/11/the-1990s-telecom-bubble-what-ca... "Om Malik wrote a book on this period in which he estimated that $750 billion vanished when the telecom bubble burst. That’s a reasonable estimate in my view. The most interesting questions about a phenomenon like this are always: Why did it happen? What can we learn?"
- grey-area 4y ago
  It's also a bad design for its intended use as a digital currency. There are fundamental design flaws which mean Bitcoin will never be a world currency - pseudo-anonymity, distributed ledgers, chained transactions, lack of central authority, all come at a cost and solve problems most people don't have.
  - worik 4y ago
    > , all come at a cost and solve problems most people don't have. Oh yes > lack of central authority This is one thing that really gets my goat. Money is hard to define but one property of money is that is serves as a web of trust. That trust has a source, a central bank. A fiat currency is as good as the central bank that controls it. Crypto has no trust, by design. It cannot fit into that space. It cannot replace fiat currency.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > Except by 2000 there were hundreds of Web companies that had become real companies. It was obvious that Google, eBay, Yahoo and Amazon would survive the downturn of 2000-2001. Yahoo seems to have struggled with becoming a real company.
  - danaris 4y ago
    But not until years later. Yahoo was still very much a player in the industry after the dot-com crash.
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      > Yahoo was still very much a player in the industry after the dot-com crash. Perhaps, but were they a "real company" at the time? If so, when did that change?
      - danaris 4y ago
        I mean, what do you mean by a "real company"? It was independent—not owned by any larger parent—until it was bought by Verizon in 2016. It wasn't particularly "hip and up-and-coming" past the early 2000s, but it was still operating, independent, and profitable for years after the dot-bomb.
      - bandrami 4y ago
        They became a "real company" when they signed the search deal with Google and stopped using Inktomi (search had been a secondary feature of Yahoo until that point; the real "value" was seen in their Big Blue Wall of curated links). That was also roughly when they finished fully integrating Viaweb (Hi, PG!) into their store. This was if my ancient memory serves roughly exactly during the April 2000 crash.
- mw888 4y ago
  You don’t like the use case for crypto, you don’t accept the narratives it’s proponents put forward and you conveniently fail to mention the objective measure of value we can actually use to compare: market capitalization. I’m sure you would believe that Bitcoin only has the market cap it has because people are speculating on it, when in reality the reason it never dies is because with each wave of speculation there are new people who store wealth in it. A subtle but important difference, objectively measurable ignored by this argument you put forth I’ve now read 100 times. Crypto is a lot like politics - people feel entitled to their opinion on it whether they possess sophistication, competence, open mindedness or not.
  - kennend3 4y ago
    speaking of "narratives" ... "market cap" is a terrible metric. Inflated assets often have very high market caps. Look at the recent wave of "market cap" reductions on other stocks of questionable value like Facebook.
    - mw888 4y ago
      Market cap is not a narrative, it’s the only objective measure so far in our dialogue. > recent That’s great you point out the importance of long term trends, I shouldn’t even have to articulate my point now. But why not go deeper anyways? Market cap for Bitcoin is a proxy for hashrate, which is a measure of security. Steadily increasing floor across its entire lifespan.
      - Nursie 4y ago
        Market cap is meaningless bullshit. I mint a billion tokens, sell one to a friend for a buck, I suddenly have a billion dollar market cap.
      - kennend3 4y ago
        you pitching that "market cap" proves bitcoins value is a narrative.. You can make the case that everything is a "proxy" for whatever you like. "Facebooks market cap is a proxy for ... which is a measure of ..." If market cap is critical, when bitcoin has a major "correction" and the market cap drastically falls, what does this indicate?
- abetusk 4y ago
  I think this is a decent response but it's not completely fair. It was obvious to me that when Google came out, it was a game changer. It wasn't obvious to everyone and I remember at least one article talking about how Google wasn't really search because it could only find what other people liked and couldn't actually understand the things it was searching (the article was old, I can't find it, sorry). EBay was a front end for Beanie Baby sales before it became legitimate. Yahoo before Google, much like the rest of the search engines like AltaVista, was a cesspool of irrelevant links to porn. Amazon was great for books but being the "Sears of the internet" was a laughable idea until it wasn't. As an aside, it was obvious to me that Wikipedia was also a game changer. I remember having many conversations with people thinking that an online encyclopedia would degrade into a radioactive comment forum with anyone and everyone saying whatever it is that they wanted, without any relation to reality. I agree that cryptocurrency has been around for a while with not a lot of use cases to show for it but I also want to point out that until "Web 2.0" came around, the internet and online services were still very niche. It wasn't until social networking took off that it became widely adopted. It wasn't until smart phones existed and became cheap enough that everyone took the internet for granted. You're using metrics from a previous iteration and imposing them on a new technology. Maybe it's appropriate but, in my view, it's tone deaf to what the underlying technology is. Cryptocurrencies are, in my opinion, more akin to the early days internet infrastructure. It's lower level foundational technology that can be used for applications to be built on top of. As a fundamental technology, it is getting widespread adoption, as can be seen by the volume and value. Real world people are using it to exchange money. We can argue about what percentage of that money is "valid" and for what purpose, but it is being used. Again, in my opinion, we're seeing the growing pains of a new technology that has potential but hasn't been widely adopted. People have funds that are hard to move out of the cryptocurrency space so any outlet for spending within the system, like with NFTs, gets amplified. EBay was a front end for Beanie Baby sales and the same arguments levied against cryptocurrencies could have been levied against EBay (and I suspect they almost surely were). Telling people you would order toilet paper online was laughable in 2000 and considered hype, just as saying you could order toilet paper without a bank account now. I don't have a crystal ball, I don't know what the future holds but the visceral hate that I see against cryptocurrencies seems more rooted in emotion than in reality. I saw the same hate for start-ups mid 2000s. I'm advocating for circumspection.
yunohn 4y ago
> Fucked Company allowed employees to post anonymous comments on why their employer was losing money, had abused employees, or was discriminating against some group, identifying unethical managers and defective products or services by name. Employees were free to explain why they thought the companies were going out of business. This really doesn't sound like the same thing at all. Just saying “bad ideas exist everywhere” isn’t a valid retort. Plus unlike crypto, web and software technology has actually almost consumed every inch of our reality.
- birracerveza 4y ago
  > web and software technology has actually almost consumed every inch of our reality. Has that happened DURING the dot com bubble as well?
  - piva00 4y ago
    It was definitely visible during the dot-com bubble that some projects, ideas, companies would have a future. And back in 2000-2001 people were already experiencing the advantages and benefits of using the web and products on the web in their lives. Contrast that with crypto, 15 years in and no one knows exactly what's good for, there is no mass of people being helped by it. There are some traces of some people being able to evade capital controls in dictatorships and... That's basically it, no other benefits to the masses have shown up, at all. What was the cost of this benefit? Hundreds of thousands to millions have been scammed out of their money by con-artists.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    AT&T was putting out ads that correctly predicted more or less all of our current consumer tech world in 1993. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm9jr0cSqZo&feature=share&si=ELPmzJkDCLju2KnD5oyZMQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm9jr0cSqZo&feature=share&si... The use cases were pretty clear and you didn’t need to be a quasi-religious fanatic with vested financial interests to find them believable.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nosianu 4y ago
In addition to what others replied: Crypto is one very specific thing, even at he broadest interpretation and acknowledging possible future ideas based on it. The web is more than just one order of magnitude broader and basis for a far wider and more diverse set of ideas and use cases. So to me, your comparison looks more than just a little weak.
- mw888 4y ago
  That’s a good point against a common argument. It’s like saying cookies aren’t selling as well as eggs.
- cactusplant7374 4y ago
KaiserPro 4y ago
> I would urge people to be a little more circumspect about cryptocurrency technologies. Good ideas will out. In crypto, they don't even have to be good, just not utterly shite, corrupt or broken. crypto as cash, has it's downsides, (total visibility, low transaction volume, difficult to secure) but it more or less works. legally, thats pretty simple. all you have to do is make people think 1 token is worth is x dollars. The problem is, people think that you can apply the same logic to everything else. looks at the NFT crowd The big problem is that for legal stuff, you can't just go full digital. You need to provide a stable and workable link to "old school" legal processes for your crypto stuff to be valid. For example NFTs could have been useful, if they were backed by a real contract system. The price that they were going for, it would have been simple, if it wasn't money laundering. Allowing quick and simple exchanging of digital content regardless of country of origin is a really useful tool. sure in 20 years, it might be as simple as something like a signed database update, but we've got to do the work to get there first.
- nurettin 4y ago
  NFTs are literally contracts. On ETH, they implement IEIP721.
  - replygirl 4y ago
    smart contracts are not "literally" contracts in the legal sense, as there isn't precedent of enforceability in enough jurisdictions for any lawyer in their right mind to use a smart contract without an accompanying traditional text contract. this is taught in law schools as best practice and will be with us for at least a decade, almost certainly longer. sure some applications of smart contracts might streamline ops (international logistics comes to mind), but in a legal scope they just make things riskier and more tedious
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      > smart contracts might streamline ops (international logistics comes to mind) "Smart contracts" is just code. In case of crypto this code is running on world's most innefficient VM. Elsewhere its just code and code has been runnig "contracts" for as long as there have been computers. Everytime you buy a ticket inline, there's a "smart contract" running. Everytime you listen to music inline and money get accumulated and paid to artists, there's a "smart contract". etc.

lkrubner 4y ago

Except by 2000 there were hundreds of Web companies that had become real companies. It was obvious that Google, eBay, Yahoo and Amazon would survive the downturn of 2000-2001. While there were many bad ideas, there were obviously many good ideas that had become real businesses. And this was just 7 years after Congress had change the law to allow commercial activity on the Internet. By contrast, Bitcoin is almost 15 years old, but in all this time, no one has been able to find a large-scale use for crypto, other than financial speculation and buying illegal drugs and evading national capital controls -- in other words, it remains almost entirely used for criminal activity.

tromp 4y ago
> other than financial speculation and buying illegal drugs and evading national capital controls -- in other words, it remains almost entirely used for criminal activity. Speculation is the main use. How is that criminal?
- potatototoo99 4y ago
  Speculation with false pretenses, just with the purpose of defrauding investors is criminal.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  Maybe not criminal, but a dependency on Greater Fools for capital gain feels immoral.
kkielhofner 4y ago
Speaking of Google (as one example), it went from research project to impacting daily lives (including mine as a teenager in flyover country) within two years for a couple of million dollars (max - inflation adjusted). The crypto ecosystem has had tens of billions of dollars invested in it (not to mention countless token scams, etc) over the past decade and other than people with gambling accounts on exchanges (which are internal order books and don’t touch a blockchain) there is no meaningful usage. No one with any kind of intellectual and rational honesty can compare the development of the crypto ecosystem to the internet, web, etc. Tens of billions of dollars and a decade later there still isn’t a single crypto Google.
- jboy55 4y ago
  Looking at the dot-com era, it probably would be more likely to compare crypto to the sudden rise and collapse of the 'dark fiber' companies. https://25iq.com/2017/11/11/the-1990s-telecom-bubble-what-can-we-learn/ https://25iq.com/2017/11/11/the-1990s-telecom-bubble-what-ca... "Om Malik wrote a book on this period in which he estimated that $750 billion vanished when the telecom bubble burst. That’s a reasonable estimate in my view. The most interesting questions about a phenomenon like this are always: Why did it happen? What can we learn?"
grey-area 4y ago
It's also a bad design for its intended use as a digital currency. There are fundamental design flaws which mean Bitcoin will never be a world currency - pseudo-anonymity, distributed ledgers, chained transactions, lack of central authority, all come at a cost and solve problems most people don't have.
- worik 4y ago
  > , all come at a cost and solve problems most people don't have. Oh yes > lack of central authority This is one thing that really gets my goat. Money is hard to define but one property of money is that is serves as a web of trust. That trust has a source, a central bank. A fiat currency is as good as the central bank that controls it. Crypto has no trust, by design. It cannot fit into that space. It cannot replace fiat currency.
thaumasiotes 4y ago
> Except by 2000 there were hundreds of Web companies that had become real companies. It was obvious that Google, eBay, Yahoo and Amazon would survive the downturn of 2000-2001. Yahoo seems to have struggled with becoming a real company.
- danaris 4y ago
  But not until years later. Yahoo was still very much a player in the industry after the dot-com crash.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > Yahoo was still very much a player in the industry after the dot-com crash. Perhaps, but were they a "real company" at the time? If so, when did that change?
    - danaris 4y ago
      I mean, what do you mean by a "real company"? It was independent—not owned by any larger parent—until it was bought by Verizon in 2016. It wasn't particularly "hip and up-and-coming" past the early 2000s, but it was still operating, independent, and profitable for years after the dot-bomb.
    - bandrami 4y ago
      They became a "real company" when they signed the search deal with Google and stopped using Inktomi (search had been a secondary feature of Yahoo until that point; the real "value" was seen in their Big Blue Wall of curated links). That was also roughly when they finished fully integrating Viaweb (Hi, PG!) into their store. This was if my ancient memory serves roughly exactly during the April 2000 crash.
mw888 4y ago
You don’t like the use case for crypto, you don’t accept the narratives it’s proponents put forward and you conveniently fail to mention the objective measure of value we can actually use to compare: market capitalization. I’m sure you would believe that Bitcoin only has the market cap it has because people are speculating on it, when in reality the reason it never dies is because with each wave of speculation there are new people who store wealth in it. A subtle but important difference, objectively measurable ignored by this argument you put forth I’ve now read 100 times. Crypto is a lot like politics - people feel entitled to their opinion on it whether they possess sophistication, competence, open mindedness or not.
- kennend3 4y ago
  speaking of "narratives" ... "market cap" is a terrible metric. Inflated assets often have very high market caps. Look at the recent wave of "market cap" reductions on other stocks of questionable value like Facebook.
  - mw888 4y ago
    Market cap is not a narrative, it’s the only objective measure so far in our dialogue. > recent That’s great you point out the importance of long term trends, I shouldn’t even have to articulate my point now. But why not go deeper anyways? Market cap for Bitcoin is a proxy for hashrate, which is a measure of security. Steadily increasing floor across its entire lifespan.
    - Nursie 4y ago
      Market cap is meaningless bullshit. I mint a billion tokens, sell one to a friend for a buck, I suddenly have a billion dollar market cap.
    - kennend3 4y ago
      you pitching that "market cap" proves bitcoins value is a narrative.. You can make the case that everything is a "proxy" for whatever you like. "Facebooks market cap is a proxy for ... which is a measure of ..." If market cap is critical, when bitcoin has a major "correction" and the market cap drastically falls, what does this indicate?
abetusk 4y ago
I think this is a decent response but it's not completely fair. It was obvious to me that when Google came out, it was a game changer. It wasn't obvious to everyone and I remember at least one article talking about how Google wasn't really search because it could only find what other people liked and couldn't actually understand the things it was searching (the article was old, I can't find it, sorry). EBay was a front end for Beanie Baby sales before it became legitimate. Yahoo before Google, much like the rest of the search engines like AltaVista, was a cesspool of irrelevant links to porn. Amazon was great for books but being the "Sears of the internet" was a laughable idea until it wasn't. As an aside, it was obvious to me that Wikipedia was also a game changer. I remember having many conversations with people thinking that an online encyclopedia would degrade into a radioactive comment forum with anyone and everyone saying whatever it is that they wanted, without any relation to reality. I agree that cryptocurrency has been around for a while with not a lot of use cases to show for it but I also want to point out that until "Web 2.0" came around, the internet and online services were still very niche. It wasn't until social networking took off that it became widely adopted. It wasn't until smart phones existed and became cheap enough that everyone took the internet for granted. You're using metrics from a previous iteration and imposing them on a new technology. Maybe it's appropriate but, in my view, it's tone deaf to what the underlying technology is. Cryptocurrencies are, in my opinion, more akin to the early days internet infrastructure. It's lower level foundational technology that can be used for applications to be built on top of. As a fundamental technology, it is getting widespread adoption, as can be seen by the volume and value. Real world people are using it to exchange money. We can argue about what percentage of that money is "valid" and for what purpose, but it is being used. Again, in my opinion, we're seeing the growing pains of a new technology that has potential but hasn't been widely adopted. People have funds that are hard to move out of the cryptocurrency space so any outlet for spending within the system, like with NFTs, gets amplified. EBay was a front end for Beanie Baby sales and the same arguments levied against cryptocurrencies could have been levied against EBay (and I suspect they almost surely were). Telling people you would order toilet paper online was laughable in 2000 and considered hype, just as saying you could order toilet paper without a bank account now. I don't have a crystal ball, I don't know what the future holds but the visceral hate that I see against cryptocurrencies seems more rooted in emotion than in reality. I saw the same hate for start-ups mid 2000s. I'm advocating for circumspection.

yunohn 4y ago

> Fucked Company allowed employees to post anonymous comments on why their employer was losing money, had abused employees, or was discriminating against some group, identifying unethical managers and defective products or services by name. Employees were free to explain why they thought the companies were going out of business. This really doesn't sound like the same thing at all. Just saying “bad ideas exist everywhere” isn’t a valid retort. Plus unlike crypto, web and software technology has actually almost consumed every inch of our reality.

birracerveza 4y ago
> web and software technology has actually almost consumed every inch of our reality. Has that happened DURING the dot com bubble as well?
- piva00 4y ago
  It was definitely visible during the dot-com bubble that some projects, ideas, companies would have a future. And back in 2000-2001 people were already experiencing the advantages and benefits of using the web and products on the web in their lives. Contrast that with crypto, 15 years in and no one knows exactly what's good for, there is no mass of people being helped by it. There are some traces of some people being able to evade capital controls in dictatorships and... That's basically it, no other benefits to the masses have shown up, at all. What was the cost of this benefit? Hundreds of thousands to millions have been scammed out of their money by con-artists.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- ethanbond 4y ago
  AT&T was putting out ads that correctly predicted more or less all of our current consumer tech world in 1993. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm9jr0cSqZo&feature=share&si=ELPmzJkDCLju2KnD5oyZMQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm9jr0cSqZo&feature=share&si... The use cases were pretty clear and you didn’t need to be a quasi-religious fanatic with vested financial interests to find them believable.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nosianu 4y ago

In addition to what others replied: Crypto is one very specific thing, even at he broadest interpretation and acknowledging possible future ideas based on it. The web is more than just one order of magnitude broader and basis for a far wider and more diverse set of ideas and use cases. So to me, your comparison looks more than just a little weak.

mw888 4y ago
That’s a good point against a common argument. It’s like saying cookies aren’t selling as well as eggs.
cactusplant7374 4y ago

KaiserPro 4y ago

> I would urge people to be a little more circumspect about cryptocurrency technologies. Good ideas will out. In crypto, they don't even have to be good, just not utterly shite, corrupt or broken. crypto as cash, has it's downsides, (total visibility, low transaction volume, difficult to secure) but it more or less works. legally, thats pretty simple. all you have to do is make people think 1 token is worth is x dollars. The problem is, people think that you can apply the same logic to everything else. looks at the NFT crowd The big problem is that for legal stuff, you can't just go full digital. You need to provide a stable and workable link to "old school" legal processes for your crypto stuff to be valid. For example NFTs could have been useful, if they were backed by a real contract system. The price that they were going for, it would have been simple, if it wasn't money laundering. Allowing quick and simple exchanging of digital content regardless of country of origin is a really useful tool. sure in 20 years, it might be as simple as something like a signed database update, but we've got to do the work to get there first.

nurettin 4y ago
NFTs are literally contracts. On ETH, they implement IEIP721.
- replygirl 4y ago
  smart contracts are not "literally" contracts in the legal sense, as there isn't precedent of enforceability in enough jurisdictions for any lawyer in their right mind to use a smart contract without an accompanying traditional text contract. this is taught in law schools as best practice and will be with us for at least a decade, almost certainly longer. sure some applications of smart contracts might streamline ops (international logistics comes to mind), but in a legal scope they just make things riskier and more tedious
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > smart contracts might streamline ops (international logistics comes to mind) "Smart contracts" is just code. In case of crypto this code is running on world's most innefficient VM. Elsewhere its just code and code has been runnig "contracts" for as long as there have been computers. Everytime you buy a ticket inline, there's a "smart contract" running. Everytime you listen to music inline and money get accumulated and paid to artists, there's a "smart contract". etc.