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Keep in mind that all the major source on crypto, including the top dozen popular textbooks I could find on amazon -- and many "academic" looking papers -- are

Keep in mind that all the major source on crypto, including the top dozen popular textbooks I could find on amazon -- and many "academic" looking papers -- are written by people profoundly invested in selling crypto. All crypto news is press releases from crypto companies. All crypto ideas are rehearsed sales pitches with no arguments or evidence. You should assume anything written on crypto which hypes it is a lie. You should investigate the site/author, and -- I'd predict -- you'll find that every single time it links back to people with profound economic incentives to lie to you. For BTC, you have 400,000 addresses used daily transacting about 300,000 transactions. This is trivial to obtain as a public record. How many of those addresses are associated with only one individual? If i wanted to simulate millions of users I could do so only with a trivial amount of money. What is a "user"? It's just an address. There are no "users" on the chain. There are 70mil addresses on BTC, I believe. How fast could an interested party double that? Pretty quick. These numbers, absent hard-hitting empirical data, should be regarded as fraud. They're made up, either at the level of the press release, or by technical manipulation. Eg., by moving lots of money around a few accounts to manipulate figures. This is a system which maps, at least provably and publicly, to the entire daily economy of a small town. And it's energy usage is measured in 10^12

kipchak 4y ago
Even in a steel man argument I think someone would have to concede that BTC itself can not be the base layer most people, with a layer 2 like Lightning being necessary for scale which has it's own problems. Unfortunately as you say it is hard to tell how much genuine usage there is. The only thing I would add is that while crypto is worse, I feel the same concern regarding misaligned incentives in regular finance. In terms of address count, they're also as I understand intended to be use once[1]. On the other hand there's many people using the same wallet and transacting without ever leaving a exchange and causing a real transaction, though I probably wouldn't consider that as "counting" personally. [1]https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address_reuse https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address_reuse
pazimzadeh 4y ago
> Keep in mind that all the major source on crypto, including the top dozen popular textbooks I could find on amazon -- and many "academic" looking papers -- are written by people profoundly invested in selling crypto > All crypto news is press releases from crypto companies Again, you could say the same thing about people trying to prop up the capitalist system as they are heavily invested in it and own property, etc.. I could argue that people arguing against crypto are mainly people who are upset that they missed the boat on the biggest price gains. But you could also make that argument about the stock market/capitalism. So it's not a valid point.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  > So it's not a valid point. Economics textbooks are not written by people trying to hype an asset. > you could say the same thing about people trying to prop up the capitalist system Sure, and the heavily manipulated housing market, propped up by QE which dramatically inflated asset prices, is a major issue facing several large economies (eg., AU, UK esp.). However homes, at the end of the day, are homes. If you're conned into overpaying 100,000 on a home whose value will drop 150k at some point because of obvious on-coming market corrections -- well, you still have a home. Crypto's market correction is "to about zero". And there's no home left. Crypto is a scam. These ideas are part of the scam. These whatabouts and fasle equivocations. It's as much a homeopath saying, "what about big pharma?"
  - pazimzadeh 4y ago
    > Economics textbooks are not written by people trying to hype an asset Even if economics textbooks are not written by the doomsayers for whatever reason, do you think banks and private companies are not doing PR blitzes for assets right before dumping them on us? > If you're conned into overpaying 100,000 on a home whose value will drop 150k at some point because of obvious on-coming market corrections -- well, you still have a home Well, at the end of the day you still have your ETH whether the price is $2k, 30 cents or $24k and you can use it to do public decentralized work across the L1 network. On which things like You can also trade it or buy the VitaDAO token and vote on funding for translational research proposals https://www.researchhub.com/paper/1266843/vitadao-whitepaper https://www.researchhub.com/paper/1266843/vitadao-whitepaper

kipchak 4y ago

Even in a steel man argument I think someone would have to concede that BTC itself can not be the base layer most people, with a layer 2 like Lightning being necessary for scale which has it's own problems. Unfortunately as you say it is hard to tell how much genuine usage there is. The only thing I would add is that while crypto is worse, I feel the same concern regarding misaligned incentives in regular finance. In terms of address count, they're also as I understand intended to be use once[1]. On the other hand there's many people using the same wallet and transacting without ever leaving a exchange and causing a real transaction, though I probably wouldn't consider that as "counting" personally. [1]https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address_reuse https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address_reuse

pazimzadeh 4y ago

> Keep in mind that all the major source on crypto, including the top dozen popular textbooks I could find on amazon -- and many "academic" looking papers -- are written by people profoundly invested in selling crypto > All crypto news is press releases from crypto companies Again, you could say the same thing about people trying to prop up the capitalist system as they are heavily invested in it and own property, etc.. I could argue that people arguing against crypto are mainly people who are upset that they missed the boat on the biggest price gains. But you could also make that argument about the stock market/capitalism. So it's not a valid point.

mjburgess 4y ago
> So it's not a valid point. Economics textbooks are not written by people trying to hype an asset. > you could say the same thing about people trying to prop up the capitalist system Sure, and the heavily manipulated housing market, propped up by QE which dramatically inflated asset prices, is a major issue facing several large economies (eg., AU, UK esp.). However homes, at the end of the day, are homes. If you're conned into overpaying 100,000 on a home whose value will drop 150k at some point because of obvious on-coming market corrections -- well, you still have a home. Crypto's market correction is "to about zero". And there's no home left. Crypto is a scam. These ideas are part of the scam. These whatabouts and fasle equivocations. It's as much a homeopath saying, "what about big pharma?"
- pazimzadeh 4y ago
  > Economics textbooks are not written by people trying to hype an asset Even if economics textbooks are not written by the doomsayers for whatever reason, do you think banks and private companies are not doing PR blitzes for assets right before dumping them on us? > If you're conned into overpaying 100,000 on a home whose value will drop 150k at some point because of obvious on-coming market corrections -- well, you still have a home Well, at the end of the day you still have your ETH whether the price is $2k, 30 cents or $24k and you can use it to do public decentralized work across the L1 network. On which things like You can also trade it or buy the VitaDAO token and vote on funding for translational research proposals https://www.researchhub.com/paper/1266843/vitadao-whitepaper https://www.researchhub.com/paper/1266843/vitadao-whitepaper