Can confirm. I’m friends with a group of very smart distributed systems engineers who were excited to launch an actually useful crypto project that gets talked about here from time to time.
As much as they’re excited about the technology itself, very few people are actually interested in using it. Instead, their business seems to revolve around the value of the utility tokens for their project.
Few people are buying the utility tokens to pay for the service. They’re buying them to horde so they can resell to other speculators when the price goes up. They have a lot of tokens in circulation, but only a small number of them get used to pay for the service. Many of them are sitting in the wallets of exchanges where they get traded back and forth but never come near the blockchain.
Investors only care about getting more press releases out so they can pump up the price of their discounted tokens, which have a shortened lockup period relative to something like stocks. It’s almost like a pump-and-dump scheme for investors.
Maybe their underlying project will become popular in the future, but the volatility of the token price makes it increasingly unattractive for companies that want to actually use it.
> They’re buying them to horde so they can resell to other speculators when the price goes up.
It's almost like all interest in cryptocurrency is driven by greed and speculation. I've been learning more about it, and I'm pretty convinced this is the case. Go into any crypto space, and all people are talking about is yield, price action, how much their tokens have grown etc. I think the only thing I've seen that isn't purely about speculation is NFTs, oddly enough, which seem to be basically a fad.
To be fair though that's most things. That's the very purpose of the stock market. When you buy a stock most of the time most people don't care what the company it represents does, they just want the stock to go up. Same thing can be applied to most things there are vast warehouses full of art people will never see as its just owned as a tax dodge / speculation. Heck most of us work jobs we hate for nothing but money. Greed / speculation and the need for income make the world go round.
It wasn't always this way, in the early days there was genuine excitement around the technology. bitcointalk.org was a hive of ideas and opportunities. Bitcoin was used to transact internationally to trade goods, it was a payment medium as it was supposed to be. Even the bitcoin subreddit was good, but that turned first. Then all forums became dominated by price. I shudder at the posts I read these days about newbies to bitcoin. You are right it has become all about greed, nothing about the technology. When BTC hit $20k I remember telling a friend that while I was happy with the price it was ridiculous, bitcoin hadn't changed sufficiently to be worth that, but I also knew that if it hit $20k it would hit $50k and $100k, but I alway thought it would take longer because I assumed it would come from adoption of the technology. But it is all speculation now, you only have to love at dogecoin to see that. It is a virtually limitless coin, if it hits $10 it is through sheer madness. The same things said about bitcoin are being said about dogecoin. "It will be the payment medium of the internet, you can buy a coffee with it etc. But every post in the subreddit is about Lambos and moons.
NFTs are the same thing though, yes the medium differs, but these high benchmark prices are being paid by people with hundreds of millions in cryptocurrency, with the aim pretty much of minting their own NFTs and selling them. Those big ticket items are just painting the tape. Likely bought and sold by the same people in many cases (if we take the crypto markets in general as a guide).
That would happen if you call something a currency. Maybe we should have called it something else, and derived its value from its application. But hindsight, etc. The plan was btc would be insanely liquid and decentralized it would collapse the banking system. So we went 200% with cryptocurrency. Now we’re trying to force the planet to ignore the potential sunk cost of having invested their life savings into it, to instead look at more useful tokens.
Cryptocurrencies fundamentally are about transactions. So I don't think it's appropriate to claim cryptocurrencies are any more driven by greed and speculation than any other common transactional activities, such as saving money in a bank account, mortgaging a home or buying a cup of coffee.
> Investors only care about getting more press releases out so they can pump up the price of their discounted tokens, which have a shortened lockup period relative to something like stocks. It’s almost like a pump-and-dump scheme for investors.
"almost"
If even useful services are being abused for speculation, it's time to realise the entire space is fundamentally broken. We've already seen massive fraud in the space, it's only a matter of time before people who fundamentally don't understand what they are "investing in" are left holding bags. It will necessarily collapse because of how it's being used. (imo)
How is this any different from the "web tech" space at large? Where investors will push towards "data-hoarding", privacy-invasion, dark patterns and/or addictiveness or other psychological "abuse", more often than not?
Perhaps their initial approach was not the right one i.e. was the public token the right method to maximize the value of their actual offering? Maybe they need to rethink given what you have said.
I know of a very similar company (might even be the same one) the telegram forum they have setup is just full of people speculating what will / might happen ...will it go to the moon... etc.. They have now moderated that out but still main reason people join the group to start with.
This is impossible. If it can be traded it can be speculated. The value of any tradable asset is determined by how much someone is willing to trade for it and by nothing else. There is no way to make it stable other than to make it impossible to trade.
> 2. You aim to build a community, but in reality 90% of your telegram/discord are scammers and people asking why price is going down/accusations that you and your entire team should go to jail.
I'm consistently repulsed by the lack of thoughtful discussion in crypto communities. For a space littered with intriguing technology it's endlessly frustrating that there's no HN-like forum. Instead, any community that started off that way is now filled with speculators and shillers.
Take your pick for where to source your news: 1. crypto influencers on YouTube who are paid to shill, 2. forums likw Reddit filled with speculators and conmen, 3. pump and dump groups on Telegram.
The greed and FOMO on display in the crypto gold-rush is deeply depressing, and for the majority who join the craze at the peak of the bull run, it'll surely end in tears.
> it's endlessly frustrating that there's no HN-like forum
There are communities like this, such as the crypto dev discord, the daily gwei discord, ethereum cat herders discord, etc. You're just in the wrong communities. That's like spending time on 4chan and saying "the internet sucks, it's filled with horrible people and no thoughtful discussions."
I do think it's scattered, but certainly there. There are many high-quality and thoughtful Twitter posters but you really have to filter. Meanwhile, I think there is room for a crypto HN since HN is actively hostile to anything positive towards crypto.
> Take your pick for where to source your news [actual answers]:
1. Newsletters. One basic example is Bitcoin Optech. I've always been the kind of person who looks at any newsletter just about long enough to put it in Trash. But I've come to understand there are plenty of greatly curated and/or written ones out there.
2. Podcasts. I can recommend Unconfirmed and Zero Knowledge, for example.
3. Discord (I know I miss out by not going here but the noise-to-signal ration and complete lack of privacy/anonymity/anything like that are both too much. It makes me a bit sad that this is where the action is even for infrastructure and supposedly open/freedom-asserting projects.)
Can be non-trivial to find the good ones for whatever angle/topic you are interested in, of course.
> The greed and FOMO on display in the crypto gold-rush is deeply depressing
Absolutely agree and I couldn't agree more with the comment you're replying to.
For podcasts I recommend Uncommon Core (technical) and Up Only (which despite the name is not just “up only” shilling and has excellent guests lineups)
I’ve been thinking about forking HN to have crypto discussions, I really wish there was a board like this which only talked about technical stuff of crypto
I think this depends on the coin. The IOTA discord is quite interesting, and people using the tech. Not sure IOTA will be a thing though, but I still like reading the discussions in the Discord.
As someone interested in all of cryptography, I cringe every single time when we call blockchain "crypto".
Sure, there's cryptography in it. But you don't call a mail or http server "crypto". There's similar tech in git, we don't call it "crypto", we call it VCS.
Calling this "crypto" is just trying to add a mystic aura for stuff people don't understand, to further muddy the waters.
We have a word for this technology. It's not "crypto". It's blockchain.
Sure, it's your shorthand for "cryptocoin" or "cryptovalue". Which are again newspeak for blockchain, and we could argue that given its limits and usage of the last years they should be called crypto-investment, at best.
Which is still like ordering a pizza and forcefully referring to it only as "food". I want a pepperoni-food please.
Sorry for the rant, but it really feels like it's just a way to further embellish something with dubious values like the post points out
Regardless of the "crypto" shorthand, blockchains are distinct from cryptocurrencies. A cryptocurrency can exist without using a blockchain to record balance changes, and likewise, a blockchain can exist which is not used for recording accounts or spendable outputs.
The "crypto" shorthand emerged from the cryptocurrency side, which by and large, uses cryptographic primitives in order to spend and receive value. One further bit worth adding is that the market demand for cryptocurrencies broadly has directed massive amounts of resources towards the development of novel cryptographic primitives.
As someone who works on stuff that involves cryptography but not cryptocurrency, I agree, but at this point I consider it a lost cause. Cryptocurrencies have taken over so much of the popular imagination that even when I say "cryptography" I get responses like "oh you mean like Bitcoin?"
It's like people will create their own desired footpaths over fields when the sidewalks are not in the right place, so it seems the word "crypto" is just a shortcut because there aren't any shorter words to describe blockchain.
A new one was created to convey a shared concept (aka the purpose of language) and will always be more popular than the thing you invested way too much time into to change.
It’ll sting at first but time to accept that and update your lexicon.
"crypto" means hidden/concealed, if we're going to go there. I sometimes use the term "cryptoracist" but I had to stop because most people don't know what κρυπτός means.
> 16. And my personal pet peeve is that, by and large, most of crypto actually does want Bitcoin to die. Perhaps not in a "I want Bitcoin to go to zero", but in a, "Bitcoin doesn't do anything and so I want its value to be rightly distributed to my project, which has real utility".
This is the most frustrating thing about crypto and has been since at least 2016. Most of the projects with the highest market cap in the space either don't do anything, don't plan on doing anything and don't have any purpose.
And then you have a myriad of projects that are rewriting the traditional finance playbooks. Or blockchain infrastructure projects that are laying the foundations of what could be a fully decentralized and anonymous web. And they're worth a 100th of DOGE's market cap. Granted, they might still very well be grossly overvalued. Especially at this stage of the bull market. But the fact that there's such assymetry with projects that are at best vaporware and at worse outright scams is by far the most frustrating part of crypto.
> Most of the projects with the highest market cap in the space either don't do anything, don't plan on doing anything and don't have any purpose.
The second most valued crypto-currency is Ethereum. And the entire ecosystem around it does plan on doing a lot of things, starting with decentralised finance.
There are also efforts to layer a network on top of Bitcoin in a bid to counter-act Ethereum. And competing networks like Diem (Facebook, Spotify, Uber...), CENTRE (Coinbase / Circle...), Stellar (Stripe...) that aim to replace the current payments infrastructure.
Then there are cross-chains like Polkadot, Cosmos, Polygon et al that try to make all of these disparate blockchains inter-programmable.
Agree that pump and dump schemes seem like the norm, but that's like saying Internet has no utility and is crap because there's porn, spam, and malware all around.
I said most because indeed most of the innovation, both technical and cultural originates from Ethereum.
But DOGE, XRP, ADA, LTC, BCH, TRON, ETC. EOS, NEO, BSV are all in the top 25 and have nothing to show for it despite being some of the oldest players in the space. The L2 projects on Bitcoin are not new and they've never brought anything revolutionary. And I think BTC is fine without L2, it's a very different philosophy from ETH and I can respect that. I just don't think it does or will ever deliver the typeof value that ETH and the projects hosted on it do.
Polygon, Cosmos or other innovative L1 projects like Avalanche, Algorand or HBAR all sit at 9 digit mcap - which is certainly very high but still annoyingly low when you consider that DOGE is worth 77 billion dollars and BSC, whose sole purpose is to make scams out of ETH projects and run them on a centralized chain, sits close to 100 billion dollars.
"4. You realize that most of the "influencer" network of crypto is actually a cartel of individuals who all know each other and collude in pumping the same bags. They all cost around $20k-30k for a review, btw."
This is the sad truth about all these people on Youtube / Twitch. I know two individuals who are sucked into their "shows" and use what they are saying as gospel. It drives me nuts because they spout off numbers like "BTC @ 100k" and theres no date given.. I just respond by saving an even more ridiculous number like "BTC @ 100bn"
Still waiting for someone to name one singular measurable impact of a crypto project.
It's a solution that's been searching for a problem for over 10 years.
Decentralized, distributed, blah blah, stop drinking the koolaid.
Is a network controlled primarily by 4 mining companies decentralized?
Do you need a distributed network to sell NFTS that are only useable within the world of a specific video game company? (game nfts)
Name a project that can't be accomplished traditionally with the cloud and some code?
Name a reason why you should leave your FDIC insured government backed bank for a 3rd party wallet and incur transaction fees, gas fees, fraud, hacks ect that are equivalent to wire transfer fees cbx fees ect.
The crypto community has been spewing advantages that don't exist and solutions for problems that do. not. exist.
I was looking at a project called Helium or HNT. The basic idea is that "miners" are running something like a mix between a WiFi endpoint and a personal cell tower. People can use HNT tokens to get network access and the miners earn the tokens by providing the access.
I thought it seemed like a pretty neat idea and was encouraged by the fact that this crypto project actually did something useful. As I looked into it though I could only find people talking about how to mine the token, or details about the price, and nobody was talking about using the network. I wanted to try the network myself, or see if I could get a device on the network and what the service was like.
It's a little naive of me, but at first I was imagining something like cell service being provided by this system. I was wondering what it would take to get my laptop on it and imagining having a network connection wherever for a low price.
When I looked into it though I didn't find anyone using the network. The limitations on the network were severe, if I recall correctly their pricing calculator shows you the price of network usage in terms of cost per packet, where a packet can send something like 16 bits of information. Their envisioned use case was a collar for pets to wear that could ping the network once a day, but to my knowledge no such collars had actually been created or sold...
Disappointed to find something that looked kind of useful at first glance actually resolve to something that looks kind of useless.
FDIC covers all 6 billion people on earth now? You can store an unlimited amount of money in your head by memorizing 12 words. Like it or not, that has value to a lot of people around the world for a lot of different reasons.
> Still waiting for someone to name one singular measurable impact of a crypto project.
It's a solution that's been searching for a problem for over 10 years.
Protection against a devaluing currency, privacy and access.
> Name a reason why you should leave your FDIC insured government backed bank for a 3rd party wallet and incur transaction fees, gas fees, fraud, hacks ect that are equivalent to wire transfer fees cbx fees ect.
For so many people the answer is simply: higher interest rates.
DeFi: Removing middlemen (and their fees) as well as discrimination based on arbitrary criteria from all kinds of financial services. Also, these services can easily run 24/7.
This is a brilliant thread and sums up neatly what's wrong with crypto space in general.
> 90% of your telegram/discord are scammers and people asking why price is going down/accusations that you and your entire team should go to jail.
So much this. The greed of get-rich-quick crowd is the biggest hurdle in the success of crypto. Remove the incentives from crypto projects and you'll see how the interest from general public decreases. After all no one cared about BTC until people figured out how to build a ponzi scheme out of it.
It's also one of its biggest strengths. People with real value at stake in an ecosystem will do anything possible to increase the value of their holdings, which means making the overall ecosystem more valuable through individual and team contributions, all open source contributions I might add.
Here is a free tip if you want to do it anyway.
DON'T CREATE ANOTHER F**ING TOKEN!
Build you product on an existing reliable fast and cheap blockchain that fits your needs.
Focus on the product not the price of tokens on said DLT.
You dont need a token. No, really you dont. Your tokens only use case is likely to transfer value and guess which token can do this better than yours? All of them! Simply because they already have adoption/liquidity/fiat on-ramps etc. etc.
You also instantly gain a community simply by using a token that has a community already.
And you avoid lots of legal problems.
Here are some companies that did/do this:
coil.com
sologenic.org
gatehub.net
forte.io
raisedinspace.com
(Very biased (they all use XRPL.org) because I simply dont know other projects. But you get the point, every DLT that actually works in a useful way should have people building on top - if not its probably garbage tech)
> You dont need a token. No, really you dont. Your tokens only use case is likely to transfer value
Other way round: transferring value to yourself is the only use case.
If you take a second to look in the mirror and see the wreckage of previous startups in this space, you'll see that - as pointed out in the OP thread - 99% of the community is there for the pump and dump. For all the practical purposes, distributed solutions end up worse than centralised ones. Except possibly for censorship resistance, which means you have the problem of attracting people who want to use it because they've been banned from other services.
> > You dont need a token. No, really you dont. Your tokens only use case is likely to transfer value
> Other way round: transferring value to yourself is the only use case.
Everyone needs money. These tho claims are contradictory. If by creating tokens you can transfer value to yourself, it is clear use case and thats why people will keep creating tokens.
Sounds to me as if you dont have any "blockchain project" ideas. That's fine do something else.
If whatever you every wished to crate does not profit form this tech, it probably really just does not profit form it. Nothing wrong with that. It would be a shame to slap blockchain on a cool project that doesn't need it.
Another good example would be a project like Uniswap on Ethereum that existed for a long time without a token. To your point precisely, Uniswap v1 was similar to the Bancor project but explicitly removed the token/tokenomics. The simplified launch made the protocol better for both them and their users.
> Edit: I thought this was legitimate reasoning behind having your own token. I don't mean it in an inflammatory way. Please explain why you disagree.
Because you don't need to create a token at all to tip creators, inflationary or otherwise.
If you want to use crypto, just use an existing blockchain. Or don't use crypto and just create a centralized market that pays out at certain thresholds. Blockchain solutions aren't actually cheaper than centralized solutions, they just hide all of the costs elsewhere in transaction fees and mining payouts.
The only reason to create an all-new token is to have something to sell to people under the guise of enabling value. It was a bad trick when car washes sold car wash tokens instead of letting you pay for car washes directly, and it's a bad trick when crypto companies make you buy their tokens instead of just buying the service directly.
I dont think this is a downside at all.
If you build on a existing blockchain you ofc need funding rather than "printing" you own funding. It may be harder but also less of a legal risk.
BTW Coil.com pays content creators based on user interaction. Its however not self printed money its form actual user who want to support content creator rather than ad-companies.
Ofc coil itself runs on funding money like any other startup nothing wrong with that.
Also a project can ask the team behind the DLT they want to use and possibly get some of their reserves. Its in their interest that the DLT is used for something. Actual devs who build something are worth way more than the thousands of people who just buy something because Elon Musk tweets about it.
And btw at the same time a dev can still bet on price gains or the token they use. I see no moral problem with that. If your product actually creates demand that moves the price up and you bet on that you own it.
> Here are some companies that did/do this:
coil.com
gatehub.net
forte.io
^ This is a bit silly of a counterexample given that these 3 companies are all able to exist from the significant XRP investments from Ripple.
> You dont need a token. No, really you dont. Your tokens only use case is likely to transfer value
That's rather untrue. Token use cases have proliferated through the advent of DeFi (decentralized finance). This would be a more accurate take during the 2017 ICO bubble but the space has matured a great deal. There are valid use cases now such as governance, fee sharing, derivatives, etc.
> But you get the point, every DLT that actually works in a useful way should have people building on top - if not its probably garbage tech)
This communicates OP's lack of familiarity with the crypto space. A vast majority of the tokens launched today are launched on top of the Ethereum blockchain. They're not trying to create better tokens for the transfer of value, they're trying to create tokens to help manage decentralized financial services. They're not even DLTs, they're smart contract applications.
It's rather easy to mock the crypto space and have an oversimplified perspective like this, most people will nod along. However, it's a bit sad to see people on a forum like this make such charged statements oversimplifying the work of others as "garbage tech."
Alright, so I make a two-sided market on chain, and the fees I charge accrue to... me? This seems like a similarly large legal headache to having them accrue to token holders! I am probably obligated to make sure that all users of my protocol are not Kim Jong Un, right?
Take a look at Sologenic. Sologenic is a fronted for the DEX. AFAIK they have no legal obligation to limit who is using it at all. The DEX as as its name says is decentral, they can not control it. They just make software that lets users use it. They can also not directly take fees because the DEX does not have fees (you make things decentral to remove the lurking middlemen who takes the fee)
IDK how Sologenics business model looks like (they are pretty new) but I assume they will make certain features in their apps cost something. Possibly can be payed directly with crypto.
KYC rules usually dont apply for such stuff. Fiat on-ramps have to deal with that. Hence using an existing system that already has the infrastructure is preferable.
Not necessarily. For example, https://gains.farm has a valid and novel use case: decentralised (i.e. on chain) leverage trading. Tokens you win are minted, tokens you lose are burnt.
Companies already have loyalty points and gift cards and rewards programs long before blockchain.
No consumers want to have to deal with tokens and blockchain to interact with a company.
Consumers will always do what's easiest and cheapest. Blockchain solutions are inherently more difficult, more expensive, and more risky (for the consumer) than just breaking out your credit card and getting paid 2% cashback to spend your money.
That's exactly what we dont need. 99% would use the token to move value (pay for something) and we really dont need a bazillion different tokens for that. Also most tokens are not stable and thus not very desirably for payment.
Readit News
As much as they’re excited about the technology itself, very few people are actually interested in using it. Instead, their business seems to revolve around the value of the utility tokens for their project.
Few people are buying the utility tokens to pay for the service. They’re buying them to horde so they can resell to other speculators when the price goes up. They have a lot of tokens in circulation, but only a small number of them get used to pay for the service. Many of them are sitting in the wallets of exchanges where they get traded back and forth but never come near the blockchain.
Investors only care about getting more press releases out so they can pump up the price of their discounted tokens, which have a shortened lockup period relative to something like stocks. It’s almost like a pump-and-dump scheme for investors.
Maybe their underlying project will become popular in the future, but the volatility of the token price makes it increasingly unattractive for companies that want to actually use it.
It's almost like all interest in cryptocurrency is driven by greed and speculation. I've been learning more about it, and I'm pretty convinced this is the case. Go into any crypto space, and all people are talking about is yield, price action, how much their tokens have grown etc. I think the only thing I've seen that isn't purely about speculation is NFTs, oddly enough, which seem to be basically a fad.
It's a real shame.
Name one crypto project making any sort of impact.
"almost"
If even useful services are being abused for speculation, it's time to realise the entire space is fundamentally broken. We've already seen massive fraud in the space, it's only a matter of time before people who fundamentally don't understand what they are "investing in" are left holding bags. It will necessarily collapse because of how it's being used. (imo)
I know of a very similar company (might even be the same one) the telegram forum they have setup is just full of people speculating what will / might happen ...will it go to the moon... etc.. They have now moderated that out but still main reason people join the group to start with.
That's not a utility token. If you want to create a true utility token, make it stable and you won't have to worry about speculation.
In much the same way, social networks almost always seem to become hookup platforms.
I'm consistently repulsed by the lack of thoughtful discussion in crypto communities. For a space littered with intriguing technology it's endlessly frustrating that there's no HN-like forum. Instead, any community that started off that way is now filled with speculators and shillers.
Take your pick for where to source your news: 1. crypto influencers on YouTube who are paid to shill, 2. forums likw Reddit filled with speculators and conmen, 3. pump and dump groups on Telegram.
The greed and FOMO on display in the crypto gold-rush is deeply depressing, and for the majority who join the craze at the peak of the bull run, it'll surely end in tears.
There are communities like this, such as the crypto dev discord, the daily gwei discord, ethereum cat herders discord, etc. You're just in the wrong communities. That's like spending time on 4chan and saying "the internet sucks, it's filled with horrible people and no thoughtful discussions."
1. Newsletters. One basic example is Bitcoin Optech. I've always been the kind of person who looks at any newsletter just about long enough to put it in Trash. But I've come to understand there are plenty of greatly curated and/or written ones out there.
2. Podcasts. I can recommend Unconfirmed and Zero Knowledge, for example.
3. Discord (I know I miss out by not going here but the noise-to-signal ration and complete lack of privacy/anonymity/anything like that are both too much. It makes me a bit sad that this is where the action is even for infrastructure and supposedly open/freedom-asserting projects.)
Can be non-trivial to find the good ones for whatever angle/topic you are interested in, of course.
> The greed and FOMO on display in the crypto gold-rush is deeply depressing
Absolutely agree and I couldn't agree more with the comment you're replying to.
Dead Comment
You cant discuss flaws in the current design or future design because people think you are attacking their investment!
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Sure, there's cryptography in it. But you don't call a mail or http server "crypto". There's similar tech in git, we don't call it "crypto", we call it VCS.
Calling this "crypto" is just trying to add a mystic aura for stuff people don't understand, to further muddy the waters.
We have a word for this technology. It's not "crypto". It's blockchain.
Sure, it's your shorthand for "cryptocoin" or "cryptovalue". Which are again newspeak for blockchain, and we could argue that given its limits and usage of the last years they should be called crypto-investment, at best.
Which is still like ordering a pizza and forcefully referring to it only as "food". I want a pepperoni-food please.
Sorry for the rant, but it really feels like it's just a way to further embellish something with dubious values like the post points out
The "crypto" shorthand emerged from the cryptocurrency side, which by and large, uses cryptographic primitives in order to spend and receive value. One further bit worth adding is that the market demand for cryptocurrencies broadly has directed massive amounts of resources towards the development of novel cryptographic primitives.
A new one was created to convey a shared concept (aka the purpose of language) and will always be more popular than the thing you invested way too much time into to change.
It’ll sting at first but time to accept that and update your lexicon.
/thread.
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This is the most frustrating thing about crypto and has been since at least 2016. Most of the projects with the highest market cap in the space either don't do anything, don't plan on doing anything and don't have any purpose.
And then you have a myriad of projects that are rewriting the traditional finance playbooks. Or blockchain infrastructure projects that are laying the foundations of what could be a fully decentralized and anonymous web. And they're worth a 100th of DOGE's market cap. Granted, they might still very well be grossly overvalued. Especially at this stage of the bull market. But the fact that there's such assymetry with projects that are at best vaporware and at worse outright scams is by far the most frustrating part of crypto.
The second most valued crypto-currency is Ethereum. And the entire ecosystem around it does plan on doing a lot of things, starting with decentralised finance.
There are also efforts to layer a network on top of Bitcoin in a bid to counter-act Ethereum. And competing networks like Diem (Facebook, Spotify, Uber...), CENTRE (Coinbase / Circle...), Stellar (Stripe...) that aim to replace the current payments infrastructure.
Then there are cross-chains like Polkadot, Cosmos, Polygon et al that try to make all of these disparate blockchains inter-programmable.
Agree that pump and dump schemes seem like the norm, but that's like saying Internet has no utility and is crap because there's porn, spam, and malware all around.
Polygon, Cosmos or other innovative L1 projects like Avalanche, Algorand or HBAR all sit at 9 digit mcap - which is certainly very high but still annoyingly low when you consider that DOGE is worth 77 billion dollars and BSC, whose sole purpose is to make scams out of ETH projects and run them on a centralized chain, sits close to 100 billion dollars.
This is the sad truth about all these people on Youtube / Twitch. I know two individuals who are sucked into their "shows" and use what they are saying as gospel. It drives me nuts because they spout off numbers like "BTC @ 100k" and theres no date given.. I just respond by saving an even more ridiculous number like "BTC @ 100bn"
It's a solution that's been searching for a problem for over 10 years.
Decentralized, distributed, blah blah, stop drinking the koolaid.
Is a network controlled primarily by 4 mining companies decentralized?
Do you need a distributed network to sell NFTS that are only useable within the world of a specific video game company? (game nfts)
Name a project that can't be accomplished traditionally with the cloud and some code?
Name a reason why you should leave your FDIC insured government backed bank for a 3rd party wallet and incur transaction fees, gas fees, fraud, hacks ect that are equivalent to wire transfer fees cbx fees ect.
The crypto community has been spewing advantages that don't exist and solutions for problems that do. not. exist.
I thought it seemed like a pretty neat idea and was encouraged by the fact that this crypto project actually did something useful. As I looked into it though I could only find people talking about how to mine the token, or details about the price, and nobody was talking about using the network. I wanted to try the network myself, or see if I could get a device on the network and what the service was like.
It's a little naive of me, but at first I was imagining something like cell service being provided by this system. I was wondering what it would take to get my laptop on it and imagining having a network connection wherever for a low price.
When I looked into it though I didn't find anyone using the network. The limitations on the network were severe, if I recall correctly their pricing calculator shows you the price of network usage in terms of cost per packet, where a packet can send something like 16 bits of information. Their envisioned use case was a collar for pets to wear that could ping the network once a day, but to my knowledge no such collars had actually been created or sold...
Disappointed to find something that looked kind of useful at first glance actually resolve to something that looks kind of useless.
Protection against a devaluing currency, privacy and access.
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For so many people the answer is simply: higher interest rates.
> 90% of your telegram/discord are scammers and people asking why price is going down/accusations that you and your entire team should go to jail.
So much this. The greed of get-rich-quick crowd is the biggest hurdle in the success of crypto. Remove the incentives from crypto projects and you'll see how the interest from general public decreases. After all no one cared about BTC until people figured out how to build a ponzi scheme out of it.
Build you product on an existing reliable fast and cheap blockchain that fits your needs. Focus on the product not the price of tokens on said DLT.
You dont need a token. No, really you dont. Your tokens only use case is likely to transfer value and guess which token can do this better than yours? All of them! Simply because they already have adoption/liquidity/fiat on-ramps etc. etc. You also instantly gain a community simply by using a token that has a community already.
And you avoid lots of legal problems.
Here are some companies that did/do this:
coil.com
sologenic.org
gatehub.net
forte.io
raisedinspace.com
(Very biased (they all use XRPL.org) because I simply dont know other projects. But you get the point, every DLT that actually works in a useful way should have people building on top - if not its probably garbage tech)
Other way round: transferring value to yourself is the only use case.
If you take a second to look in the mirror and see the wreckage of previous startups in this space, you'll see that - as pointed out in the OP thread - 99% of the community is there for the pump and dump. For all the practical purposes, distributed solutions end up worse than centralised ones. Except possibly for censorship resistance, which means you have the problem of attracting people who want to use it because they've been banned from other services.
- it makes it easier to raise capital by claiming that what you are doing involves crypto, because then you get crypto-type valuations
- you can get money from people who want to speculate
> Other way round: transferring value to yourself is the only use case.
Everyone needs money. These tho claims are contradictory. If by creating tokens you can transfer value to yourself, it is clear use case and thats why people will keep creating tokens.
For example PeakD.com inflates hive to give content creators tips based on likes.
Edit: I thought this was legitimate reasoning behind having your own token. I don't mean it in an inflammatory way. Please explain why you disagree.
Because you don't need to create a token at all to tip creators, inflationary or otherwise.
If you want to use crypto, just use an existing blockchain. Or don't use crypto and just create a centralized market that pays out at certain thresholds. Blockchain solutions aren't actually cheaper than centralized solutions, they just hide all of the costs elsewhere in transaction fees and mining payouts.
The only reason to create an all-new token is to have something to sell to people under the guise of enabling value. It was a bad trick when car washes sold car wash tokens instead of letting you pay for car washes directly, and it's a bad trick when crypto companies make you buy their tokens instead of just buying the service directly.
BTW Coil.com pays content creators based on user interaction. Its however not self printed money its form actual user who want to support content creator rather than ad-companies. Ofc coil itself runs on funding money like any other startup nothing wrong with that.
Also a project can ask the team behind the DLT they want to use and possibly get some of their reserves. Its in their interest that the DLT is used for something. Actual devs who build something are worth way more than the thousands of people who just buy something because Elon Musk tweets about it.
And btw at the same time a dev can still bet on price gains or the token they use. I see no moral problem with that. If your product actually creates demand that moves the price up and you bet on that you own it.
^ This is a bit silly of a counterexample given that these 3 companies are all able to exist from the significant XRP investments from Ripple.
> You dont need a token. No, really you dont. Your tokens only use case is likely to transfer value
That's rather untrue. Token use cases have proliferated through the advent of DeFi (decentralized finance). This would be a more accurate take during the 2017 ICO bubble but the space has matured a great deal. There are valid use cases now such as governance, fee sharing, derivatives, etc.
> But you get the point, every DLT that actually works in a useful way should have people building on top - if not its probably garbage tech)
This communicates OP's lack of familiarity with the crypto space. A vast majority of the tokens launched today are launched on top of the Ethereum blockchain. They're not trying to create better tokens for the transfer of value, they're trying to create tokens to help manage decentralized financial services. They're not even DLTs, they're smart contract applications.
It's rather easy to mock the crypto space and have an oversimplified perspective like this, most people will nod along. However, it's a bit sad to see people on a forum like this make such charged statements oversimplifying the work of others as "garbage tech."
No consumers want to have to deal with tokens and blockchain to interact with a company.
Consumers will always do what's easiest and cheapest. Blockchain solutions are inherently more difficult, more expensive, and more risky (for the consumer) than just breaking out your credit card and getting paid 2% cashback to spend your money.
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