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The promise of crypto has not lived up to its initial excitement

53 points by martincmartin 3y ago

nostromo177 3y ago
[dead]
ftxbro 3y ago
It's like saying the promise of beanie babies has not lived up to its initial excitement, I mean OK what did you expect. People were excited about beanie babies. Was that bad? No, it's OK to be excited about things you like. EDIT: everyone is downvoting me you guys must really hate beanie babies EDIT 2: oh maybe they don't like my username. it's a joke name, people.
rektide 3y ago
The actual value of crypto as a technology seems to have receeded past visibility. At its origin, it promised enduring new forms of interconnected computing. But overwhelmingly, there seem to be no contemporary applications of any note, just endless cryptocoins of unremarkable note as far as the eye can see.
- forgetfreeman 3y ago
  Probably because there never was any actual value to be had in the underlying technology. If there was someone would have found it at some point in the last decade.
  - epgui 3y ago
    That’s a bit overly dismissive, and I am usually the dismissive one when it comes to crypto. IMO we’ll eventually have CBDCs which may or may not have a blockchain, but these things happen slowly. I’ve always said that money is not fundamentally a tech problem, but a social problem. That doesn’t make the tech inherently worthless though.
    - forgetfreeman 3y ago
      I mean, it's been 14 years now, if some actual valuable use of strapping intentionally onerous calculations to a transaction model was waiting, you'd think we'd have found it by now.
      - rektide 3y ago
        I disagree. Although I have extreme cynicism so far, I am far from making a long term conclusion. I think it's a hugely contemporary disease to expect short term results to indicate long term value, something tech in particular has made us totally wildly out of touch on. We have had two or three decades of ongoing massive tectonic shifts, and seem huge new entities arise, and I strongly feel this view has dis-tempered our expectations & realism about growth. Worse, when there is a huge movement, when something is so ballyhooed & hype trained, the expectations are all the more wild. I really think block chain has been utterly unable to show it's value, has failed miserably to even try to establish use cases or flows to express it's value on. But even still, after all this time, even while being a huge cynic of what's happened, I'm not going to deny that there are possibilities out there. That we did get so hyped, that the cryptocoins hype train so dominated took away the creative energy, stole the nutrients that real value might have used to establish itself & grow. It's hard to imagine how we can get out of such deeply intermediated ridiculously centralized & incredibly costly & inefficient forms of block chains. But it's also not my field & I still easily can believe these are great enclaves of stability out there, places of value lurking, waiting to be found. I think in general we radically over dismiss tech as not valuable, if it doesn't meet our hockeystick growth expectations. I've seen web spec after web spec cast aside because only 0.3% of web sites adopted it after 3 or 5 years. I think we really need a radical realignment for how to expect technology adoption to happen. We need to allow ourselves much more Uncertainty about what is happening, and when things do go wrong, that is often less reason to cancel the idea, and more reason to restart the clock from 0, after mis-interpretation.
        epgui 3y ago
        > I really think block chain has been utterly unable to show it's value It's just an append-only distributed database. If you need that for some application, then you find it valuable. These discussions are often so hyperbolic-- Imagine saying that columnar databases have not lived up to their expectations (or have been unable to show their value) because postgres and mysql are still quite popular... it sounds about the same to me.
- nailer 3y ago
  Digital art where artists get paid and royalties are enforced, instant global money transfer, software standards for fractionalised investments in stocks real estate physical collectibles and other asset classes, retail without 3% going to visa, digital gold, a world where everybody has a friendly name for their public key and we can communicate privately, probably others.
  - XorNot 3y ago
    Blockchain can solve no problem (by technical means) which depends on the status of physical assets. Which ironically also includes digital assets, on account of the analog-hole existing (you have to shoot light into eyeballs at some point).
    - nailer 3y ago
      The contract pays a physical asset custodian for storage, property taxes or whatever other costs. So blockchain specifically provides a financial incentive for a custodian. Eyeballs thing is true, but hasn’t stopped cryptography being effective in other areas for example, Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Apple TV etc seem to be doing well despite the electrons reaching my eyeballs unencrypted. The same applies to collectible images, videos and code.
      - XorNot 3y ago
        > The contract pays a physical asset custodian for storage, property taxes or whatever other costs. So blockchain specifically provides a financial incentive for a custodian. How does a smart contract ensure the custodian is doing any of the things it assumes they are? What is the actual mechanism meant to be, that resists someone inputting "yes I definitely have this car here" when they do not?
        nailer 3y ago
        This is correct, blockchain does not stop Fraud. I don’t think anyone is asserting that it does.
- auscad 3y ago
  > At it's [sic] origin, it promised enduring new forms of interconnected computing. Have you read the Bitcoin whitepaper? You should, it’s not that long. This is not what was promised. We were promised a decentralized peer to peer currency with a fixed supply that couldn’t be inflated at the whims of a central bank. We got that. And we sort of also got “new forms of interconnected computing”. We now have new types of zero knowledge proofs which were designed for smart contract verification but are more generally useful. We have things like IPFS allowing you to store data in a decentralized way. There’s helium, a mesh network for IoT devices. We have ENS. Then of course we have an endless supply of sophisticated financial instruments which you probably wouldn’t be able to access otherwise. Your position is easy to take because it’s sort of the “default” that an uninformed person would believe, and those people will side with you.
  - hpeter 3y ago
    Helium is kind of a failure tho. Last I heard it has very little users. I'm into ETH big time, but there are not many applications for it that are worth the fees.
  - prepend 3y ago
    > Your position is easy to take because it’s sort of the “default” that an uninformed person would believe, and those people will side with you. Isn’t it also the position of the well informed that think crypto is BS and are waiting (14 years now) for a non-drug use case?
    - hpeter 3y ago
      You can launder money with it also /sarcasm
    - GoblinSlayer 3y ago
      You're poorly informed. I used it for donations. It's the only pseudonymous network-native currency that I know.
  - rektide 3y ago
    The value being completely unapparent & unappealing to the world sort of sells my prospective though, doesn't it? Using block chain to store data or transact is incredibly costly & inefficient. Most of the systems surrounding those usages are an incredible obtuse pain in the ass, no fun at all. Most uses rely on one or more extremely intermediated centralized systems. The whole thing seems bankrupt. There hasn't been a single notable use. The most well known use case so far beyond cryptocoins is crypto kitties.
- rvz 3y ago
  > But overwhelmingly, there seem to be no contemporary applications of any note, just endless cryptocoins of unremarkable note as far as the eye can see. There is a use case. NFTs for example can be used for ticketing systems. Here is a real world use case which you can see for your own eyes. [0] [0] https://www.ledgerinsights.com/uks-wembley-stadium-adopts-blockchain-ticketing-tixngo-starting-with-sheeran-concert/ https://www.ledgerinsights.com/uks-wembley-stadium-adopts-bl...
  - danaris 3y ago
    When most people say "a use case", they mean "a use case that is beneficial, and that provides enough advantage over existing ways to do the same thing that it outweighs the significant drawbacks of using a blockchain." Ticketing isn't exactly a hard problem. It gains nothing meaningful by using NFTs for it.
    - rvz 3y ago
      > When most people say "a use case"... Nope. This is the original claim: > ...there seem to be no contemporary applications of any note... It is a valid use-case and it is an improvement, otherwise it would not be possible at all, especially when I gave a direct source proving that there is a real world business using NFTs to solve their ticketing problem, especially for anti-fraud purposes and all verifiable on a public blockchain. > Ticketing isn't exactly a hard problem. Is that why many are using NFTs for ticketing systems, including Ticketmaster? [0] [1] Looks like a great use case for NFTs and they seem to gain a lot from using them. [0] https://boxoffice.sitickets.com/ https://boxoffice.sitickets.com/ [1] https://business.ticketmaster.com/business-solutions/nft-token-gated-sales/ https://business.ticketmaster.com/business-solutions/nft-tok...
forgetfreeman 3y ago
Now there's a pithy title that vastly understates the case. There was an article on here earlier about how the Secret Service take on crypto that pretty much utterly destroys all of the crypto hype mill talking points about decentralization, anonimity, etc. I'm glad that I've lived long enough to see that particular arc of bullshit run it's course.
- ssss11 3y ago
  I’m not sure anyone believed it to be anonymous other than those who misunderstand it.
  - forgetfreeman 3y ago
    You might need a refresher then. Rewind the clock about 12 years and there were folks involved in the development of blockchain tech that routinely hopped on every broadcast channel available to man to declare this tech would not only usher in an era of perfect anonymity to financial transactions, it would be so perfectly anonymous as to threaten fiat currency as a concept as it would hamper governments' ability to collect taxes.
b0sk 3y ago
It was entirely a grift, a reverse robinhood that shifted swaths of money from retail investors to a select few.
bedobi 3y ago
Waaay back, I thought Bitcoin was a cool technology, and convinced some friends of mine with businesses to accept it. We had a lot of fun with it - it was really cool to pay for your beer by scanning a QR code and seeing the transaction come through this public, distributed, tamper proof ledger, like magic, with no need for money, banks or any of the other financial infrastructure we're used to. Sadly, the "crypto space" was quickly invaded by hordes of people who never really cared about the technology itself, how it works and what it's actually useful for. (and what it's not useful for) These people, who know nothing about it, and for years had dismissed it as a joke, suddenly began to talk about it very seriously as a very serious "investment" in self-proclaimed "expert" capacity. You know the type of person I'm talking about! We've all seen them, and most of us can probably count one or two amongst our friends. The potential for cool applications of blockchains is still there, but so far it seems to me cryptocurrency has mostly just been abused as a vehicle for crazy, baseless manias, and little to no meaningful application.
- EGreg 3y ago
  I cared about the technology: https://intercoin.org https://intercoin.org Sadly I was too much of a socialist and there for the tech and utility. Suffice it to say that people threw money at memecoins way more than they threw up money at us, but we did raise a respectable amount in 2018: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1733567/000173356718000002/xslFormDX01/primary_doc.xml https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1733567/000173356718... My vision was mainstream adoption of crypto for all the right reasons. Every community having their own coin and their own monetary policy. https://intercoin.org/communities.pdf https://intercoin.org/communities.pdf I already had an open source social platform (https://github.com/Qbix https://github.com/Qbix) with people in over 100 countries so it seemed like building a payment platform on top of it made sense. So this is what I did: Architected all the smart contracts on https://github.com/Intercoin https://github.com/Intercoin Bootstrapped with revenues and customers and paid our developers for years Released all the smart contracts and documentation on our own platform here: https://intercoin.app https://intercoin.app Got CertiK audits of our smart contracts: https://skynet.certik.com/projects/intercoin https://skynet.certik.com/projects/intercoin Launched a show where I interviewed economists, regulators, and people like Noam Chomsky and Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton Friedman) https://youtube.com/intercoin https://youtube.com/intercoin Made ways to raise money that are actually legal: https://community.intercoin.app/t/how-intercoin-helps-to-raise-money-for-your-project/ https://community.intercoin.app/t/how-intercoin-helps-to-rai... Built technology for people around the world to raise money for refugees: https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees By the way, if you want to come and hear more about it, you're welcome to, we have demos at the end of every month: https://intercoin.app/event/ITR/Qwwsjokht https://intercoin.app/event/ITR/Qwwsjokht And we do it on our own platform, livestreaming through peer to peer broadcasting, the works! Next on our roadmap is to release Intercoin Wallet (completely web-based wallet will try to fix major security flaws in the current Web3 ecosystem) and Intercloud (decentralized layer 1 solution that is NOT a blockchain) But on HN we get lumped in with the rest of the Web3 bullshit and scam artists, so what can I say. This will probably be downvoted by people who never click a single link in the comment :-P
d--b 3y ago
We’ve been over this over and over again. Tech is valuable. Alternative currency is useful in some countries. Speculation sucks. Electric usage is silly. Blah blah blah. My bet is that crypto is going to disappear eventually.
deleted 3y ago
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throwaway22032 3y ago
Yet I can still send censorship free bitcoin and store it on a napkin. My choice quote from the article is that they consider a $1.3 trillion market to be "only". That's just under $1 million for each copy of The Economist sold this year. Perhaps they have a distorted sense of size.
- prepend 3y ago
  I don’t think it’s fair to value crypto at $1.3T as there’s a substantial amount of self dealing to inflate asset prices. I don’t believe the value of the NFT market either when people are selling things to themself and claiming a market value. It’s like claiming the economy in Roblox has some massive amount when there’s no actual check or way to determine actual liquid value. If people wanted to sell all their crypto they aren’t getting $1.4T. If people want to sell $1.4T of US fiat, they are probably getting around$1.4T.
  - andirk 3y ago
    I'm familiar with regularass auction houses and they take a fat cut up to 20% per transaction. That's crazy but there's much less incentive to sell+buy when 20% is lost in the transaction. The NFT auction houses could take a cut that then gets distributed to all sellers or something like that. There has to be a loss in the transaction else the transaction means jack shit
- asdfman123 3y ago
  Fits all my requirements for currency: isn’t “censored” (?) and can fit on a napkin
  - andirk 3y ago
    A password on a napkin that unlocks real fiat is actually very cool.
Zpalmtree 3y ago
boggles my mind how many people can't see any value in programmatic money
- dreamcompiler 3y ago
  I see huge value in the idea. The problem is nobody has yet demonstrated a token that doesn't get taken over by speculators. When that happens it becomes useless as money. And don't get me started about the "stablecoin" myth.
  - superkuh 3y ago
    The funny thing is that because the traditional finance systems were grandfathered in no one cares that they had been taken over by speculators long ago. And lets not even get started on the fiat pre-mine that is fractional reserve banking giving chartered banks the ability to mint new M0 currency, and only chartered banks. Which pragmatically means that ~4000 corporations in the USA get all the newly created currency.
    - danaris 3y ago
      When the value of the USD spikes to the point that a single dollar represents a year's worth of work at minimum wage, maybe then you can criticize it as being "taken over by speculators" in the same way that Bitcoin was.
      - superkuh 3y ago
        ... that's already happened? Cents used to be the dollar in terms of purchasing power. Inflation of the US fiat currency reached bitcoin levels a half century ago.
  - pcthrowaway 3y ago
    Being taken over by speculators is an unfortunate inevitability of any market. We wouldn't claim houses are useless because the housing market has been taken over by speculators, at least in my city.
s1gnp0st 3y ago
[flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
  - cassonmars 3y ago
    Not to be the one prone to whataboutism, but why is the one blatantly unsubstantive pro-crypto comment chided while several other equally blatantly unsubstantive anti-crypto comments never receive the same treatment?
    - aaron695 3y ago
      95% of HN comments are unsubstantive, so that was never the actual rule applied. It's probably - "Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." Saying it's unsubstantive is nicer. It was a substantive comment. It made a statement of fact that contradicted the articles title. That allowed someone to reply with another substantive fact "Bitcoin addresses hasn't grown for 2 years" with link Which I would not agree is exactly a correct summary of the data, but it's worth looking at and has create a thread far better than most of the others - https://studio.glassnode.com/metrics?a=BTC&m=addresses.ActiveCount&resolution=1month https://studio.glassnode.com/metrics?a=BTC&m=addresses.Activ...
      - s1gnp0st 3y ago
        Transactions have moved to layer two. Scarcity on layer one is an intentional, desirable property without which we have an expensive simulation of the inflationary currencies we already have.
    - dang 3y ago
      If there are other comments that broke the site guidelines that didn't get moderated, most likely we just didn't see them. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. Past explanations here in case they're useful: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=likeliest%20explanation%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
neonate 3y ago
https://archive.ph/U4xR9 https://archive.ph/U4xR9 http://web.archive.org/web/20230516233219/https://www.economist.com/special-report/2023/05/15/the-promise-of-crypto-has-not-lived-up-to-its-initial-excitement http://web.archive.org/web/20230516233219/https://www.econom...
rvz 3y ago
At least crypto is unaffected by the AI nonsense and it is not going anywhere. For both crypto and AI, the genie is out of the bottle and they cannot be stopped. Not even this crypto project [0]. But of course, no-one cares until it is too late. So instead of listening to bullshit articles like this one repeat the same arguments about cryptocurrencies, lets see what happens in the next Bitcoin halving cycle. [0] https://worldcoin.org https://worldcoin.org
raffy 3y ago
oh look, another highly-compressible, hn circle jerk about the "crypto" boogeyman tbh, i'm always impressed by no-coiner and armchair bitcoiner comments -- it's like listening to a straight-edge discuss psychedelics -- how can you comment on a space you *clearly* don't understand?
leashless 3y ago
(disclaimer: I project managed the Ethereum launch in 2015) The big problem with crypto is legal, and that problem breaks up into four categories. 1) legality of tokens of various kinds (are they securities? who can do what with tokens?) 2) KYC AML CTF PEP OFAC SOF issues: governments want to track who is who when money moves and many governments do it in many different ways 3) Taxation frameworks, and international harmonisation of taxation frameworks 4) Enforceability of contract when smart contracts are in the mix None of these are technology problems. All of them are problems which the legacy financial system solves with huge numbers of staff wasting their lives pushing the same paperwork for every single transaction, while the industrial-scale money laundering happens inside of fully regulated financial institutions which go rotten and print money until they get caught landed with symbolic fines after laundering tens of billions of drug money. If governments had made their mind up about *how they were going to regulate crypto* then all of this would have been sorted out years ago and we would have a simple, stable, efficient set of new financial rails, much like a re-invention of the credit card payment system or the SWIFT bank transfer system. But because of a failure to give clear guidance for 8 years the technology is a swamp of unregulated and poorly regulated projects, because when the actual professionals show up they can't figure out what the law is, because the law hasn't been written. MICA in the EU starts to provide the industry the necessary clarity to actually obey the (clearly written) law and mainstream into the regular world of commerce. In the UK, see the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce which is disambiguating the crypto mess from the Judiciary on out https://lawtechuk.io/ukjt https://lawtechuk.io/ukjt And also the upcoming Law Commission work https://www.lawcom.gov.uk/project/digital-assets/ https://www.lawcom.gov.uk/project/digital-assets/ (warning: contains 550 pages of UK government legal analysis) My company builds on the UK framework to enable buying and selling of physical assets across 170 jurisdictions on the same legal framework: http://mattereum.com http://mattereum.com Anyway, it's a mess, but it's not the "crypto industry's" fault -- government's failure to establish clear legal rules has made institutional adoption by grown ups impossible. As we get regulatory clarity it all goes forwards again!
- tells 3y ago
  Would you include political ideology as another problem? If bitcoin/ether fulfilled their potential, wouldn't that mean the US dollar would fall as the world reserve currency and thereby weaken the US government's influence? This seems to be the main reason for introducing a CBDC as it gives nation states complete control over their money.
jl2718 3y ago
> crypto Please stop using this prefix by itself.
friend_and_foe 3y ago
Written byby someone who does not understand it much if at all. And I don't mean doesn't understand it like a technical person or cult like devotee, I mean they have very little surface knowledge. Typical of legacy media institutions. "Crypto" initial excitement was self sovereign money. Later came the other stuff, the web3 smart contract stuff. I'd say bitcoin (little b, the idea, not just the network, other thinks like Litecoin and Monero qualify) quite live up to their initial excitement. I can store an arbitrary amount of wealth in my head that cannot be taken from me via legal processes, and I can send it to anyone I like and nobody can stop me. They can punish me, but they can't stop me. This is a revolutionary thing that IMO makes this supposed competition with traditional banking a no contest. There are selective pressures at work here. It has an algorithmically deterministic supply. I believe this is the future of money. Crypto without the currency, not talking about cryptography, is basically just ethereum. That has definitely not lived up to the hype. We never got mist browser, swarm, bzz, all the things that originally constituted the whole web3 concept. What appears to have emerged is basically a large unregulated (and unregulatable) securities exchange. This in itself can be seen as a positive thing, I think it is, but it doesnt live up. There are a few very (not to understate, very very) interesting things being done with it, but this stuff was supposed to reinvent communication and incentive structures, allow people to organize in novel ways. This has not happened and it doesn't look like it is going to happen. Instead we get NFT cartoon drawings and meme coins, interspersed with a few really inventive financial tools here and there. It's looking more and more like this is going to replace stock exchanges moreso than allow people to create autonomous organizations that control real world assets anonymously with collateralized deterministic agreements that need no court system to resolve disputes.
gumballindie 3y ago
Not much of a crypto currency enthusiast but i find this paragraph amusing: “The market value of all cryptocurrencies ballooned from $250bn at the start of 2020 to $3trn by late 2021. But it has since fallen back to just $1.3trn. ” That is larger than the entire economy of some developed countries.
sherry5530 3y ago
[dead]
frankreyes 3y ago
Wait until March 2024. Then yes.

53 points by martincmartin 3y ago

[dead]

It's like saying the promise of beanie babies has not lived up to its initial excitement, I mean OK what did you expect. People were excited about beanie babies. Was that bad? No, it's OK to be excited about things you like. EDIT: everyone is downvoting me you guys must really hate beanie babies EDIT 2: oh maybe they don't like my username. it's a joke name, people.

rektide 3y ago

The actual value of crypto as a technology seems to have receeded past visibility. At its origin, it promised enduring new forms of interconnected computing. But overwhelmingly, there seem to be no contemporary applications of any note, just endless cryptocoins of unremarkable note as far as the eye can see.

forgetfreeman 3y ago
Probably because there never was any actual value to be had in the underlying technology. If there was someone would have found it at some point in the last decade.
- epgui 3y ago
  That’s a bit overly dismissive, and I am usually the dismissive one when it comes to crypto. IMO we’ll eventually have CBDCs which may or may not have a blockchain, but these things happen slowly. I’ve always said that money is not fundamentally a tech problem, but a social problem. That doesn’t make the tech inherently worthless though.
  - forgetfreeman 3y ago
    I mean, it's been 14 years now, if some actual valuable use of strapping intentionally onerous calculations to a transaction model was waiting, you'd think we'd have found it by now.
    - rektide 3y ago
      I disagree. Although I have extreme cynicism so far, I am far from making a long term conclusion. I think it's a hugely contemporary disease to expect short term results to indicate long term value, something tech in particular has made us totally wildly out of touch on. We have had two or three decades of ongoing massive tectonic shifts, and seem huge new entities arise, and I strongly feel this view has dis-tempered our expectations & realism about growth. Worse, when there is a huge movement, when something is so ballyhooed & hype trained, the expectations are all the more wild. I really think block chain has been utterly unable to show it's value, has failed miserably to even try to establish use cases or flows to express it's value on. But even still, after all this time, even while being a huge cynic of what's happened, I'm not going to deny that there are possibilities out there. That we did get so hyped, that the cryptocoins hype train so dominated took away the creative energy, stole the nutrients that real value might have used to establish itself & grow. It's hard to imagine how we can get out of such deeply intermediated ridiculously centralized & incredibly costly & inefficient forms of block chains. But it's also not my field & I still easily can believe these are great enclaves of stability out there, places of value lurking, waiting to be found. I think in general we radically over dismiss tech as not valuable, if it doesn't meet our hockeystick growth expectations. I've seen web spec after web spec cast aside because only 0.3% of web sites adopted it after 3 or 5 years. I think we really need a radical realignment for how to expect technology adoption to happen. We need to allow ourselves much more Uncertainty about what is happening, and when things do go wrong, that is often less reason to cancel the idea, and more reason to restart the clock from 0, after mis-interpretation.
      - epgui 3y ago
        > I really think block chain has been utterly unable to show it's value It's just an append-only distributed database. If you need that for some application, then you find it valuable. These discussions are often so hyperbolic-- Imagine saying that columnar databases have not lived up to their expectations (or have been unable to show their value) because postgres and mysql are still quite popular... it sounds about the same to me.
nailer 3y ago
Digital art where artists get paid and royalties are enforced, instant global money transfer, software standards for fractionalised investments in stocks real estate physical collectibles and other asset classes, retail without 3% going to visa, digital gold, a world where everybody has a friendly name for their public key and we can communicate privately, probably others.
- XorNot 3y ago
  Blockchain can solve no problem (by technical means) which depends on the status of physical assets. Which ironically also includes digital assets, on account of the analog-hole existing (you have to shoot light into eyeballs at some point).
  - nailer 3y ago
    The contract pays a physical asset custodian for storage, property taxes or whatever other costs. So blockchain specifically provides a financial incentive for a custodian. Eyeballs thing is true, but hasn’t stopped cryptography being effective in other areas for example, Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Apple TV etc seem to be doing well despite the electrons reaching my eyeballs unencrypted. The same applies to collectible images, videos and code.
    - XorNot 3y ago
      > The contract pays a physical asset custodian for storage, property taxes or whatever other costs. So blockchain specifically provides a financial incentive for a custodian. How does a smart contract ensure the custodian is doing any of the things it assumes they are? What is the actual mechanism meant to be, that resists someone inputting "yes I definitely have this car here" when they do not?
      - nailer 3y ago
        This is correct, blockchain does not stop Fraud. I don’t think anyone is asserting that it does.
auscad 3y ago
> At it's [sic] origin, it promised enduring new forms of interconnected computing. Have you read the Bitcoin whitepaper? You should, it’s not that long. This is not what was promised. We were promised a decentralized peer to peer currency with a fixed supply that couldn’t be inflated at the whims of a central bank. We got that. And we sort of also got “new forms of interconnected computing”. We now have new types of zero knowledge proofs which were designed for smart contract verification but are more generally useful. We have things like IPFS allowing you to store data in a decentralized way. There’s helium, a mesh network for IoT devices. We have ENS. Then of course we have an endless supply of sophisticated financial instruments which you probably wouldn’t be able to access otherwise. Your position is easy to take because it’s sort of the “default” that an uninformed person would believe, and those people will side with you.
- hpeter 3y ago
  Helium is kind of a failure tho. Last I heard it has very little users. I'm into ETH big time, but there are not many applications for it that are worth the fees.
- prepend 3y ago
  > Your position is easy to take because it’s sort of the “default” that an uninformed person would believe, and those people will side with you. Isn’t it also the position of the well informed that think crypto is BS and are waiting (14 years now) for a non-drug use case?
  - hpeter 3y ago
    You can launder money with it also /sarcasm
  - GoblinSlayer 3y ago
    You're poorly informed. I used it for donations. It's the only pseudonymous network-native currency that I know.
- rektide 3y ago
  The value being completely unapparent & unappealing to the world sort of sells my prospective though, doesn't it? Using block chain to store data or transact is incredibly costly & inefficient. Most of the systems surrounding those usages are an incredible obtuse pain in the ass, no fun at all. Most uses rely on one or more extremely intermediated centralized systems. The whole thing seems bankrupt. There hasn't been a single notable use. The most well known use case so far beyond cryptocoins is crypto kitties.
rvz 3y ago
> But overwhelmingly, there seem to be no contemporary applications of any note, just endless cryptocoins of unremarkable note as far as the eye can see. There is a use case. NFTs for example can be used for ticketing systems. Here is a real world use case which you can see for your own eyes. [0] [0] https://www.ledgerinsights.com/uks-wembley-stadium-adopts-blockchain-ticketing-tixngo-starting-with-sheeran-concert/ https://www.ledgerinsights.com/uks-wembley-stadium-adopts-bl...
- danaris 3y ago
  When most people say "a use case", they mean "a use case that is beneficial, and that provides enough advantage over existing ways to do the same thing that it outweighs the significant drawbacks of using a blockchain." Ticketing isn't exactly a hard problem. It gains nothing meaningful by using NFTs for it.
  - rvz 3y ago
    > When most people say "a use case"... Nope. This is the original claim: > ...there seem to be no contemporary applications of any note... It is a valid use-case and it is an improvement, otherwise it would not be possible at all, especially when I gave a direct source proving that there is a real world business using NFTs to solve their ticketing problem, especially for anti-fraud purposes and all verifiable on a public blockchain. > Ticketing isn't exactly a hard problem. Is that why many are using NFTs for ticketing systems, including Ticketmaster? [0] [1] Looks like a great use case for NFTs and they seem to gain a lot from using them. [0] https://boxoffice.sitickets.com/ https://boxoffice.sitickets.com/ [1] https://business.ticketmaster.com/business-solutions/nft-token-gated-sales/ https://business.ticketmaster.com/business-solutions/nft-tok...

forgetfreeman 3y ago

Now there's a pithy title that vastly understates the case. There was an article on here earlier about how the Secret Service take on crypto that pretty much utterly destroys all of the crypto hype mill talking points about decentralization, anonimity, etc. I'm glad that I've lived long enough to see that particular arc of bullshit run it's course.

ssss11 3y ago
I’m not sure anyone believed it to be anonymous other than those who misunderstand it.
- forgetfreeman 3y ago
  You might need a refresher then. Rewind the clock about 12 years and there were folks involved in the development of blockchain tech that routinely hopped on every broadcast channel available to man to declare this tech would not only usher in an era of perfect anonymity to financial transactions, it would be so perfectly anonymous as to threaten fiat currency as a concept as it would hamper governments' ability to collect taxes.

b0sk 3y ago

It was entirely a grift, a reverse robinhood that shifted swaths of money from retail investors to a select few.

bedobi 3y ago

Waaay back, I thought Bitcoin was a cool technology, and convinced some friends of mine with businesses to accept it. We had a lot of fun with it - it was really cool to pay for your beer by scanning a QR code and seeing the transaction come through this public, distributed, tamper proof ledger, like magic, with no need for money, banks or any of the other financial infrastructure we're used to. Sadly, the "crypto space" was quickly invaded by hordes of people who never really cared about the technology itself, how it works and what it's actually useful for. (and what it's not useful for) These people, who know nothing about it, and for years had dismissed it as a joke, suddenly began to talk about it very seriously as a very serious "investment" in self-proclaimed "expert" capacity. You know the type of person I'm talking about! We've all seen them, and most of us can probably count one or two amongst our friends. The potential for cool applications of blockchains is still there, but so far it seems to me cryptocurrency has mostly just been abused as a vehicle for crazy, baseless manias, and little to no meaningful application.

EGreg 3y ago
I cared about the technology: https://intercoin.org https://intercoin.org Sadly I was too much of a socialist and there for the tech and utility. Suffice it to say that people threw money at memecoins way more than they threw up money at us, but we did raise a respectable amount in 2018: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1733567/000173356718000002/xslFormDX01/primary_doc.xml https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1733567/000173356718... My vision was mainstream adoption of crypto for all the right reasons. Every community having their own coin and their own monetary policy. https://intercoin.org/communities.pdf https://intercoin.org/communities.pdf I already had an open source social platform (https://github.com/Qbix https://github.com/Qbix) with people in over 100 countries so it seemed like building a payment platform on top of it made sense. So this is what I did: Architected all the smart contracts on https://github.com/Intercoin https://github.com/Intercoin Bootstrapped with revenues and customers and paid our developers for years Released all the smart contracts and documentation on our own platform here: https://intercoin.app https://intercoin.app Got CertiK audits of our smart contracts: https://skynet.certik.com/projects/intercoin https://skynet.certik.com/projects/intercoin Launched a show where I interviewed economists, regulators, and people like Noam Chomsky and Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton Friedman) https://youtube.com/intercoin https://youtube.com/intercoin Made ways to raise money that are actually legal: https://community.intercoin.app/t/how-intercoin-helps-to-raise-money-for-your-project/ https://community.intercoin.app/t/how-intercoin-helps-to-rai... Built technology for people around the world to raise money for refugees: https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees By the way, if you want to come and hear more about it, you're welcome to, we have demos at the end of every month: https://intercoin.app/event/ITR/Qwwsjokht https://intercoin.app/event/ITR/Qwwsjokht And we do it on our own platform, livestreaming through peer to peer broadcasting, the works! Next on our roadmap is to release Intercoin Wallet (completely web-based wallet will try to fix major security flaws in the current Web3 ecosystem) and Intercloud (decentralized layer 1 solution that is NOT a blockchain) But on HN we get lumped in with the rest of the Web3 bullshit and scam artists, so what can I say. This will probably be downvoted by people who never click a single link in the comment :-P

d--b 3y ago

We’ve been over this over and over again. Tech is valuable. Alternative currency is useful in some countries. Speculation sucks. Electric usage is silly. Blah blah blah. My bet is that crypto is going to disappear eventually.

deleted 3y ago

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throwaway22032 3y ago

Yet I can still send censorship free bitcoin and store it on a napkin. My choice quote from the article is that they consider a $1.3 trillion market to be "only". That's just under $1 million for each copy of The Economist sold this year. Perhaps they have a distorted sense of size.

prepend 3y ago
I don’t think it’s fair to value crypto at $1.3T as there’s a substantial amount of self dealing to inflate asset prices. I don’t believe the value of the NFT market either when people are selling things to themself and claiming a market value. It’s like claiming the economy in Roblox has some massive amount when there’s no actual check or way to determine actual liquid value. If people wanted to sell all their crypto they aren’t getting $1.4T. If people want to sell $1.4T of US fiat, they are probably getting around$1.4T.
- andirk 3y ago
  I'm familiar with regularass auction houses and they take a fat cut up to 20% per transaction. That's crazy but there's much less incentive to sell+buy when 20% is lost in the transaction. The NFT auction houses could take a cut that then gets distributed to all sellers or something like that. There has to be a loss in the transaction else the transaction means jack shit
asdfman123 3y ago
Fits all my requirements for currency: isn’t “censored” (?) and can fit on a napkin
- andirk 3y ago
  A password on a napkin that unlocks real fiat is actually very cool.

Zpalmtree 3y ago

boggles my mind how many people can't see any value in programmatic money

dreamcompiler 3y ago
I see huge value in the idea. The problem is nobody has yet demonstrated a token that doesn't get taken over by speculators. When that happens it becomes useless as money. And don't get me started about the "stablecoin" myth.
- superkuh 3y ago
  The funny thing is that because the traditional finance systems were grandfathered in no one cares that they had been taken over by speculators long ago. And lets not even get started on the fiat pre-mine that is fractional reserve banking giving chartered banks the ability to mint new M0 currency, and only chartered banks. Which pragmatically means that ~4000 corporations in the USA get all the newly created currency.
  - danaris 3y ago
    When the value of the USD spikes to the point that a single dollar represents a year's worth of work at minimum wage, maybe then you can criticize it as being "taken over by speculators" in the same way that Bitcoin was.
    - superkuh 3y ago
      ... that's already happened? Cents used to be the dollar in terms of purchasing power. Inflation of the US fiat currency reached bitcoin levels a half century ago.
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
  Being taken over by speculators is an unfortunate inevitability of any market. We wouldn't claim houses are useless because the housing market has been taken over by speculators, at least in my city.

s1gnp0st 3y ago

[flagged]

dang 3y ago
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
- cassonmars 3y ago
  Not to be the one prone to whataboutism, but why is the one blatantly unsubstantive pro-crypto comment chided while several other equally blatantly unsubstantive anti-crypto comments never receive the same treatment?
  - aaron695 3y ago
    95% of HN comments are unsubstantive, so that was never the actual rule applied. It's probably - "Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." Saying it's unsubstantive is nicer. It was a substantive comment. It made a statement of fact that contradicted the articles title. That allowed someone to reply with another substantive fact "Bitcoin addresses hasn't grown for 2 years" with link Which I would not agree is exactly a correct summary of the data, but it's worth looking at and has create a thread far better than most of the others - https://studio.glassnode.com/metrics?a=BTC&m=addresses.ActiveCount&resolution=1month https://studio.glassnode.com/metrics?a=BTC&m=addresses.Activ...
    - s1gnp0st 3y ago
      Transactions have moved to layer two. Scarcity on layer one is an intentional, desirable property without which we have an expensive simulation of the inflationary currencies we already have.
  - dang 3y ago
    If there are other comments that broke the site guidelines that didn't get moderated, most likely we just didn't see them. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. Past explanations here in case they're useful: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=likeliest%20explanation%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

neonate 3y ago

https://archive.ph/U4xR9 https://archive.ph/U4xR9 http://web.archive.org/web/20230516233219/https://www.economist.com/special-report/2023/05/15/the-promise-of-crypto-has-not-lived-up-to-its-initial-excitement http://web.archive.org/web/20230516233219/https://www.econom...

rvz 3y ago

At least crypto is unaffected by the AI nonsense and it is not going anywhere. For both crypto and AI, the genie is out of the bottle and they cannot be stopped. Not even this crypto project [0]. But of course, no-one cares until it is too late. So instead of listening to bullshit articles like this one repeat the same arguments about cryptocurrencies, lets see what happens in the next Bitcoin halving cycle. [0] https://worldcoin.org https://worldcoin.org

raffy 3y ago

oh look, another highly-compressible, hn circle jerk about the "crypto" boogeyman tbh, i'm always impressed by no-coiner and armchair bitcoiner comments -- it's like listening to a straight-edge discuss psychedelics -- how can you comment on a space you *clearly* don't understand?

leashless 3y ago

(disclaimer: I project managed the Ethereum launch in 2015) The big problem with crypto is legal, and that problem breaks up into four categories. 1) legality of tokens of various kinds (are they securities? who can do what with tokens?) 2) KYC AML CTF PEP OFAC SOF issues: governments want to track who is who when money moves and many governments do it in many different ways 3) Taxation frameworks, and international harmonisation of taxation frameworks 4) Enforceability of contract when smart contracts are in the mix None of these are technology problems. All of them are problems which the legacy financial system solves with huge numbers of staff wasting their lives pushing the same paperwork for every single transaction, while the industrial-scale money laundering happens inside of fully regulated financial institutions which go rotten and print money until they get caught landed with symbolic fines after laundering tens of billions of drug money. If governments had made their mind up about *how they were going to regulate crypto* then all of this would have been sorted out years ago and we would have a simple, stable, efficient set of new financial rails, much like a re-invention of the credit card payment system or the SWIFT bank transfer system. But because of a failure to give clear guidance for 8 years the technology is a swamp of unregulated and poorly regulated projects, because when the actual professionals show up they can't figure out what the law is, because the law hasn't been written. MICA in the EU starts to provide the industry the necessary clarity to actually obey the (clearly written) law and mainstream into the regular world of commerce. In the UK, see the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce which is disambiguating the crypto mess from the Judiciary on out https://lawtechuk.io/ukjt https://lawtechuk.io/ukjt And also the upcoming Law Commission work https://www.lawcom.gov.uk/project/digital-assets/ https://www.lawcom.gov.uk/project/digital-assets/ (warning: contains 550 pages of UK government legal analysis) My company builds on the UK framework to enable buying and selling of physical assets across 170 jurisdictions on the same legal framework: http://mattereum.com http://mattereum.com Anyway, it's a mess, but it's not the "crypto industry's" fault -- government's failure to establish clear legal rules has made institutional adoption by grown ups impossible. As we get regulatory clarity it all goes forwards again!

tells 3y ago
Would you include political ideology as another problem? If bitcoin/ether fulfilled their potential, wouldn't that mean the US dollar would fall as the world reserve currency and thereby weaken the US government's influence? This seems to be the main reason for introducing a CBDC as it gives nation states complete control over their money.

jl2718 3y ago

> crypto Please stop using this prefix by itself.

friend_and_foe 3y ago

Written byby someone who does not understand it much if at all. And I don't mean doesn't understand it like a technical person or cult like devotee, I mean they have very little surface knowledge. Typical of legacy media institutions. "Crypto" initial excitement was self sovereign money. Later came the other stuff, the web3 smart contract stuff. I'd say bitcoin (little b, the idea, not just the network, other thinks like Litecoin and Monero qualify) quite live up to their initial excitement. I can store an arbitrary amount of wealth in my head that cannot be taken from me via legal processes, and I can send it to anyone I like and nobody can stop me. They can punish me, but they can't stop me. This is a revolutionary thing that IMO makes this supposed competition with traditional banking a no contest. There are selective pressures at work here. It has an algorithmically deterministic supply. I believe this is the future of money. Crypto without the currency, not talking about cryptography, is basically just ethereum. That has definitely not lived up to the hype. We never got mist browser, swarm, bzz, all the things that originally constituted the whole web3 concept. What appears to have emerged is basically a large unregulated (and unregulatable) securities exchange. This in itself can be seen as a positive thing, I think it is, but it doesnt live up. There are a few very (not to understate, very very) interesting things being done with it, but this stuff was supposed to reinvent communication and incentive structures, allow people to organize in novel ways. This has not happened and it doesn't look like it is going to happen. Instead we get NFT cartoon drawings and meme coins, interspersed with a few really inventive financial tools here and there. It's looking more and more like this is going to replace stock exchanges moreso than allow people to create autonomous organizations that control real world assets anonymously with collateralized deterministic agreements that need no court system to resolve disputes.

gumballindie 3y ago

Not much of a crypto currency enthusiast but i find this paragraph amusing: “The market value of all cryptocurrencies ballooned from $250bn at the start of 2020 to $3trn by late 2021. But it has since fallen back to just $1.3trn. ” That is larger than the entire economy of some developed countries.

sherry5530 3y ago

[dead]

frankreyes 3y ago

Wait until March 2024. Then yes.