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The linked page has lots of bullish prose, but the data is pretty dismal: https://a16zcrypto.com/stateofcrypto/ https://a16zcrypto.com/stateofcrypto/ Lots of

The linked page has lots of bullish prose, but the data is pretty dismal: https://a16zcrypto.com/stateofcrypto/ https://a16zcrypto.com/stateofcrypto/ Lots of those charts are very much not up-and-to-the-right. There's almost nothing, if I was a crypto evangelist, that I'd be able to confidently point to as a sign that crypto is healthy and growing. On the contrary, there's lots of compelling signals that the opposite is true. Most fundamental, no software platform can succeed without developers. They lost a quarter of their active developers in 2022. Interested developers have fallen in 2022. People deploying contacts have held steady at best. Academia has plateaued at best and is about to fall off at worst. Job search interest has plummeted. Mobile wallet users have crashed hard. Is there any good news for crypto enthusiasts here?

lazzlazzlazz 4y ago
I read the report much more bullishly. It's clear that the things driving actual technological progress are growing. Active developers seems to have doubled over the last few years. NFT buyers is surprisingly high, having fallen much less than I imagined (need to look into this). Academic interest has skyrocketed on a 2-3 year timeframe. The report, very honestly, seems to be saying that the underlying tech is developing even though hype seems to have slowed (a repeated pattern in tech). Overall, good news!
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  Developers are up, but wallets and transactions are down. Publications and job search interest are also trending down. A currency needs people using it, otherwise it's just a pet project or an excuse to launder fiat money. And how do you justify exchanges when no one is making money via transactions? You're basically just burning electricity hoping that someone, eventually, decides they want an NFT or whatever Nu-Coin is being pushed this week. The whole thing feels like a buncha people got really stuck in and are now holding the bag, while the rest of the world quietly walks away.
  - lazzlazzlazz 4y ago
    Ethereum (where most of the activity lies) is not a currency; it's a distributed shared-state computer. Transactions represent state transitions in the computer's virtual machine[1]. It's Turing Complete! The most interest projects are entire programs and the most interesting tokens represent control over those programs, data used by those programs, or even their own programs. Calling crypto networks "currencies" is like calling the internet a chat system: there's some truth to parts of it, but it's ultimately false. [1]: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/evm/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/evm/

lazzlazzlazz 4y ago

I read the report much more bullishly. It's clear that the things driving actual technological progress are growing. Active developers seems to have doubled over the last few years. NFT buyers is surprisingly high, having fallen much less than I imagined (need to look into this). Academic interest has skyrocketed on a 2-3 year timeframe. The report, very honestly, seems to be saying that the underlying tech is developing even though hype seems to have slowed (a repeated pattern in tech). Overall, good news!

red-iron-pine 4y ago
Developers are up, but wallets and transactions are down. Publications and job search interest are also trending down. A currency needs people using it, otherwise it's just a pet project or an excuse to launder fiat money. And how do you justify exchanges when no one is making money via transactions? You're basically just burning electricity hoping that someone, eventually, decides they want an NFT or whatever Nu-Coin is being pushed this week. The whole thing feels like a buncha people got really stuck in and are now holding the bag, while the rest of the world quietly walks away.
- lazzlazzlazz 4y ago
  Ethereum (where most of the activity lies) is not a currency; it's a distributed shared-state computer. Transactions represent state transitions in the computer's virtual machine[1]. It's Turing Complete! The most interest projects are entire programs and the most interesting tokens represent control over those programs, data used by those programs, or even their own programs. Calling crypto networks "currencies" is like calling the internet a chat system: there's some truth to parts of it, but it's ultimately false. [1]: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/evm/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/evm/