I think it's fair to say that most tokens are effectively trash, and there are many scams in crypto.
Relative to other speculative manias in history, crypto is a mechanism for mania and speculation. You can't trade tulips on tulips. But you can trade crypto on crypto.
For example, in the British railway mania of the 1840s, many patterns occurred similar to today's crypto frenzy, such as stock exchanges created expressly for the purpose of trading railway stocks and publications to talk about and advertise railway stocks. But railways lack crypto's reflexivity because you can't trade railway stocks on railways. Crypto mechanizes its own speculative mania.
But what's the other side here? Does it even exist? I think it does exist. In my view, a balanced discussion of the pros and cons of crypto often seems to elude the HN community.
HN is a community of technologists, right? So what's the actual technology here? At the root of crypto are two technologies, 1) programmatic public chains that are inexpensive to run and 2) zero-knowledge proofs.
By combining public chains and zero-knowledge proofs, we get an inherently global market, with p2p transactions that scale to all of humanity, where you can send money digitally, similar to handing a $20 bill to a friend. And the transfers can include rigid, sophisticated logic that offers the potential to reduce transaction costs for many kinds of routine economic activity.
So, while it's fair to say that most crypto tokens are effectively trash and crypto mechanizes scams and speculation, it's also unfair to omit discussion of the fundamental innovation, and those who do so will end up on the wrong side of history.
> In my view, a balanced discussion of the pros and cons of crypto often seems to elude the HN community.
No. It eludes the crypto community. For every well-researched article pointing out flaws, there are exactly zero articles addressing any points in those articles. There's no end to "just join the discords and read up" though.
> At the root of crypto are two technologies, 1) programmatic public chains that are inexpensive to run
Those chains are extremely expensive to run as evidenced by the absolutely dominant one.
> 2) zero-knowledge proofs.
These are not at the "root fo crypto". This is something tacked on to try and solve the 0.00001% of crypto's problems.
> By combining public chains and zero-knowledge proofs, we get an inherently global market, with p2p transactions that scale to all of humanity
No, no we don't.
> it's also unfair to omit discussion of the fundamental innovation, and those who do so will end up on the wrong side of history.
The proof is in the pudding as it were. There's literally nothing in this "fundamental innovation" that can't be done better, faster, cheaper, and on a bigger scale with literally anything else.
- Blockchains are distributed immutable ledgers, and there are very few (if any) useful applications for them
- "programmatic chains" are the worlds slowest, most ineffecient and expensive VM that gets exploited every day because even people programming it don't understand the rules they are writing
>it's also unfair to omit discussion of the fundamental innovation, and those who do so will end up on the wrong side of history.
No, please stop with this fallacy. I don't know where people get this idea besides from marketing hype. There is no innovation in cryptocurrency. It's perfectly fair to also disregard any claims of innovation, because they're not true. I'll go into the specifics here.
>1) programmatic public chains that are inexpensive to run
The innovation you're taking about here is a database server, blockchains not necessary. AWS and Azure are also an "inexpensive programmable and public" server except you can put anything you want on it, it doesn't have to take the form of an immutable ledger. Blockchains are just strictly worse than everything else.
>2) zero-knowledge proofs.
Also has nothing to do with blockchains, zero knowledge proofs are useful for other purposes besides cryptocurrency, and were invented long before it.
>By combining public chains and zero-knowledge proofs, we get an inherently global market, with p2p transactions that scale to all of humanity, where you can send money digitally, similar to handing a $20 bill to a friend.
No, you don't. By combining those things you might get some structure that would theoretically allow you to do that, but that's only a small portion of building a scalable financial platform. There are still a ton of other services you have to build, which have to exist anyway for any form of online finance regardless of whether you use a blockchain or not. Blockchains are also not "p2p" in any way, by definition they require middlemen to run the chain.
I'm growing tired of reading these comments about cryptocurrency where basically everything is wrong, it's exhausting to deal with the torrent of misleading statements. That should tip any technologist off that something is seriously wrong there. I can't even blame you for making them, the marketing hype is just out of control and is confusing everybody.
The rest of the "technology" is vague promises and get-rich-quick schemes, using technology as the excuse. e.g., you're talking about a "global market" using ZKPs, but no such thing exists - you're stating a "blockchain could" as a "blockchain does". When "could" is a word that means "doesn't."
>programmatic public chains that are inexpensive to run
If you consider gas fees as a cost for running the chain, they absolutely are not inexpensive to run. They may well be the most expensive ledger on earth. Writing the numbers down on-per-page in a book made of gold leaf would probably be cheaper.
You're right that ethereum transaction fees are very high (https://cryptofees.info/). imo, total gas fees seem likely to continue to hyper-grow. Yet, per-transaction or per-user gas fees may be expected to plummet due to scaling technologies, especially https://arbitrum.io, https://optimism.io, and https://starknet.io (they do like those io's)
But it does surprise that so many technologists are falling into this trap (disregarding the innovation because of the plethora of junk it enables). The value of permission-less platforms and protocols should no be assessed absent of curation. Google, email spam filtering, wikipedia, the web abounds with examples and without curation we would be in a sea of shit.
Aren't these examples of centralization of a decentralized technology? If so, what's the point of starting an expensive-to-run distributed platform only to end up at the same point we're at now where in practice most activity goes through a few centralized gatekeepers? After all, you can still run your own web or SMTP server. The web is still permission-less in the trivial sense - just like crypto. But Google can blacklist your site or blackhole your emails making your permission-less services useless in practice. What stops a curated web3 from ending up in the same place we're at now?
I agree that most tokens are scammy trash, especially when advertised, but acknowledge that some will stand the test of time.
I don't think I'll ever hook up a wallet to my smartphone in order to use tap-to-pay in some hypothetical future, but I really do believe that crypto can be great at hopping traditional regulatory fences.
If I come across some desirable service offered on the web by a guy in Namibia, they're much more likely to get money from me if they accept something that I can easily acquire and send. I don't even know what Namibia's currency is, but they can list a price in BTC/ETH/DOGE and I can easily make my own judgements on whether it's worth it for me.
I agree. In dot com era most of startups are not here? Only circa1%~3% of founded between 1995 to 2001 created real economic value. Does it mean rest 97% were scams because they didnt create meaningful value etc.?
I think many of them were, yes. Not in the sense that the company founders we're trying to scam investors but in the sense that VCs and the banks involved in their IPOs hyped them up and dumped them on the public market despite knowing how little of substance was going on.
Basically the people that should have known better were happy to promote garbage to those who don't know better.
The same thing happened again in 2008 with mortgage derivatives and now I think we're headed for round 3 with crypto.
"programmatic public chains that are inexpensive to run"
Even if we ignore the equipment and operational cost, for example the energy cost of mining (dump it on a third party for example), you can't still claim that it is inexpensive to run. At least not without some serious numbers backing up the claim.
The problem with most approaches is that they throw out the baby with the bathwater. Sure, you trusting third-parties is shady. Sure, having governments handling over your money is bad. However, having a fully-immutable chain is not the solution.
Let's say, you tokenized the ownership of your home but a bad actor from the other side of the globe stole the token.
A standard certificate of ownership can still be brought to court in case of fraud, but a token cannot. I mean, you still can bring it to court, have the judge decide in your favor, but the chain is immutable and neither you or the court officials can do anything to revert that. So you'll end-up with a token that does not represent the reality - and that's why standard, traditional certificates exist and are trusted: they represent the rule of the law, something an immutable decentralized chain can't do.
Another example is just what is happening to Russia and its oligarchs. Traditional banks can be forced by the rule of the law to impose sanctions; crypto cannot. So they're just evading those sanctions in plain sight by using crypto. You may side with Russia on the current affairs, but this also applies to terrorist groups, gangs, you name it.
And it goes on and on... if you're a victim of a phishing attack like the one happened recently at OpenSea[1], but instead of signing with your wallet you filled your credit card data into a shady field, you can still contest the purchase with your bank and have your money back. Even if you authorized a one-way money transfer from your bank account, in some countries you can still contest it and eventually have your money back.[2] None of this is available for the victims of the NFT phishing scam.
So, while the technology sure has interesting points, the current use-cases are far from optimal. Society developed trust and trust-chains for a reason. If you're a going to implement this in blockchain, then you'll have to build a non-decentralized* approach from the ground up, that most of the crypto community will bash you for.
* To be fair, many consider the proof-of-stake to be a non-decentralized approach departing from the vision of S. Nakamoto. And some will even argue that the current proof-of-work mining concentration is already centralized.[3]
> I mean, you still can bring it to court, have the judge decide in your favor, but the chain is immutable and neither you or the court officials can do anything to revert that. So you'll end-up with a token that does not represent the reality - and that's why standard, traditional certificates exist and are trusted: they represent the rule of the law, something an immutable decentralized chain can't do.
Unless the token is being used to control some kind of elaborate--and likely magical--boobytrap (to enforce that the owner of the token is the only person who can even step foot on the property), the government would just say that old token was no longer authoritative and that some new token is... which is no different from how a standard title or deed also can't be blindly trusted (as it may have been revoked by the government). And yet, forging your sheets of paper or invalid transfer signatures on the real sheet of paper (how classic titles and deeds work, as in when I signed over ownership of a car once) is way easier than forging this blockchain record, and so this actually still provides a ton of benefit by avoiding cases that might have to go to court in the first place.
> I mean, you still can bring it to court, have the judge decide in your favor, but the chain is immutable and neither you or the court officials can do anything to revert that.
That's within a whisker of saying that the entire legal system is subservient to blockchain, and not the other way around.
If so it would appear to be the death-knell for all those use-cases for any official/governmental process to use blockchain... ?
One of the things that came out of climate change was the concept of the "inevitable policy response".
Basically if you recognize that coal is poisoning people for no societal benefit, then it can carry on via momentum for a while, insiders can prop it up for longer than it should, but eventually it'll get crushed and you don't want to be holding the bag when it does.
As far as I can tell, that applies to most crypto. I'm sure there's cool uses, but mostly it seems a way for people to make money from the people who will be caught out when it shuts down.
So the obvious question is, how do you do a 'big short' on this?
Coal is a bad analogy because coal also generates a lot of energy and has uses in chemistry and metallurgy, and those things create real value.
The problem with coal is that its externalities are not properly priced in, making it look quite a bit cheaper than it actually is. Much of its cost is being placed on a hidden credit card with an unknown interest rate. If all externalities were priced in coal would probably not be competitive except in places with few other good energy options and in roles where it's hard to replace like bulk virgin steel production.
Crypto has few real value-creating uses outside the original core use cases of easier international wire transfer, some utility in areas without functional banking, black/grey market commerce, and hobbyists/techno-nerds who use it because its cool. Those use cases are real but they are also the use cases that existed in 2008-2009 when Bitcoin launched.
Web3, ICOs, and DeFi all seem to be almost 100% gambling and scams. Every few months I go looking for systems and use cases for crypto other than the original ones mentioned above and all I find is gambling and scams.
I don't think crypto will go to zero, but I think its actual value is very far below its current price. FOMO marketing for various forms of web3 and token shonk is getting increasingly shrill and desperate, which is not a good sign. If I had any of this stuff I'd sell.
Of course remember: it's very hard to call the top of these things. They almost always go higher than anyone expects. Sub-prime mortgages kept going far beyond what anyone thought possible. Regardless, you don't want to be a bag holder when it eventually does crash.
The best way to win in a casino is not to play. The second best, if you've played, is to quit while you are up and ignore the fact that there is a chance it might go higher. Here's some good old fashioned Native American financial advice on this topic:
There's a core good idea at the heart of the NFT hoopla. Or at least I would say there's a core very interesting/powerful idea there. That is -- you can bake in an enforceable mechanism where the original seller gets an X percent cut of future sales.
The current implementations are often broken. Downstream sales can skirt the royalty. But that is, like many problems with crypto, a solvable engineering problem.
I call this primary-sale royalty a "good" idea because it seems like an obvious, almost intuitive way to benefit original artists. And it also just clears out mountains of regulation and royalty regime that currently track, enforce and account for royalties, and do a terrible job of it.
The problem is, you can use the same mechanism for anything, such that rich people can bake in an "I continue to get richer" royalty whenever they sell their property.
Both the good and bad side of this mechanism are just one thing you can do with programmable money. Does anybody think it's the only one -- the only new mechanism worth developing?
I'm old enough to remember the SCO vs IBM Linux lawsuit. My dad tried to short it. He couldn't even do so. There were too many shorts already. Later lots of those shorts got squeezed. The whole thing did eventually go to zero but it took a while and few actually made money shorting it.
I feel like there is a dichotomy amongst developers over crypto / web3 stuff.
The HN crowd seems to hold a generally negative view on cyptocurrencies and web3 and view it as a bit of scam with no proper use case except to leave someone holding the bag
At the same time there's seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies, enough that I think its fair to assume its likely true.
Does anybody have any insight as to why this is the case? Is somebody missing something?
I believe many people who hate crypto are the ones that have a good life in a relatively non(or less)-corrupted government-led society, which might be a good reflection of HN demographics. For them, crypto has no value because I think the biggest value proposition is decentralization, which those people don't need as they don't have a corruption problem to solve. They already have a good income, good country and system to live in, etc.
Add the many scams going on in the web3 space and it's easy to see why most people don't like it.
As a developer who started to turn into crypto recently:
I live in a corrupted country with a corrupted government that has too much power and has no good intentions for its people.
I can easily get crypto tokens or some other form of compensation for doing some work for a crypto company, which usually pays much better than regular work, while exploring new ways of thinking about how money and economy works in the first place.
As a developer I feel enthusiastic about everything crypto can offer, and learning more about Solidity development and inter-chain communications and new scalable layers just excite me even more.
There is not a single reason for me to not love crypto.
> I believe many people who hate crypto are the ones that have a good life in a relatively non(or less)-corrupted government-led society, which might be a good reflection of HN demographics.
Maybe. I hear this a lot too. But as a counterpoint, I happen to live in the USA, and have a pretty good life. I know a LOT of people who have good lives in this relatively uncorrupted society who are going into web3. And who are funded by very well off people in said country.
I'm not saying that web3 can't help people in bad countries. It's that I don't think that's the end goal of a lot of this enthusiasm. Because I don't think those people were trying to help out people in your country before crypto existed (not verified, but I think this is a reasonable belief).
> At the same time there's seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies, enough that I think its fair to assume its likely true.
Crypto companies are overfunded by VCs and offer amazing packages, more than FAANG in many cases, plus the token upside. Who doesn't want to make a quick buck?
Also, it's pretty interesting technology that can be fun to work with. Even if it's useless, it scratches the itch of working on something deeply technical instead of the boring old web technologies.
Opportunity for huge pay out. Unlike web2 startups, web3 startups provide token based ownership. It is more easily liquidated. Vesting periods are shorter for tokens.
They have potentially no limit on the ceiling for token valuation while a similar company on public market will depend on fundamentals for its valuation.
If you are on a web3 rocketship, the chances of you cashing out is much higher than otherwise similar web2 startup.
Similarly, you also have more control over the direction of the company via DAO voting. You can protect your bags from getting diluted.
Why do people work on weapons of mass destruction, despite the obvious harm that they cause to mostly innocent people?
Not everyone cares about the moral high ground. Statistically, about 5% of the population don't. So then web3.0 is extremely high pay + downside you don't care about.
HN has its own groupthink. For crypto it's that it's all coal powered shiba shitcoins.
There was likely a similar group of people bitching in 1999. The dotcom bubble did happen, and yet dot coms also happened.
The point is that to see the upside, you need to evaluate what new capabilities the tech offers, whether they're interesting, and who is doing the real work (if it exists).
It's another gold / oil rush, but this time the "resource" is electricity (actually coal and other stuff being burned). There's a lot of money in crypto at the moment so engineers and VCs will naturally chase it until governments put an end to it (I'm not condoning or opposing it, I'm just saying it will happen).
Couldn't you replace crypto with "advertising-funded walled gardens that promote addictive rage and conspiracy theories while passing all your details onto oppressive governments" and describe the last decade in the same way?
They were also going to change the world (I'm not sure if they specified for the better).
There are people with different attitudes on different issues.
For instance, I believe crypto "dividends" or "yields" are a zero-sum game, diluting the limited savings of have-nots to enrich the haves. For example ETH staking, where to avoid middlemen, you have to stake 32 ETH.
But I believe cryptocurrency as an asset is well worth it, for the competition it provides to national currencies. If these decide to overinflate, crypto provides you with a relatively-uninflated asset (though its value also depends to an extent on the liquidity of national currencies, as well as fickle bandwagon effects).
Then again, given enough pay, I might consider helping some "entrepreneur" of the zero-sum variety.
> For example ETH staking, where to avoid middlemen, you have to stake 32 ETH.
end goal would be more usage of decentralized staking pools, see Rocket Pool. this way, the ‘middleman’ is a set of smart contracts; the validators (who only require 16ETH) take a slightly higher fee than stakers (who can stake as low as 0.01ETH), for their services rendered (burden of additional maintenance, technical expertise and risk involved with running a validator).
But I do feel that centralized staking (CEX, Lido) poses a risk to the network.
> But I believe cryptocurrency as an asset is well worth it, for the competition it provides to national currencies. If these decide to overinflate, crypto provides you with a relatively-uninflated asset
Given their volatilities, cryptocurrencies are neither inflation hedges nor currencies. Somebody with a bunch of USD trying to hedge inflation will buy gold or real estate before they buy cryptocurrencies.
> At the same time there's seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies, enough that I think its fair to assume its likely true.
I'm interviewing right now at a large-ish cryptocurrency company. I'm currently an exhausted L6 at a FAANG.
The promise of fewer working hours and no on-call rota is very attractive to me, as well as the ability to start with Go f/time[1] on mostly greenfield[2] projects.
[1] Team I am on has agreed long before I joined to use nothing but Java.
[2] I'm also tired, after decades in the industry, of mostly maintaining existing products. The chance to create new stuff from scratch is very attractive.
The negative sides are very loud, making HN a place that isn't very nice to talk about technical details. You only see the comments people post. HN, like most places, mostly doesn't have a very good understanding of the underlying technology and enjoys the pithy hot takes. "An NFT is just _bad analogy_" is everywhere, and other complaints often read like "Rails? People make blogs with that and I saw a load of blogs filled with spam, I don't like rails".
> At the same time there's seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies, enough that I think its fair to assume its likely true.
People build plenty of things for companies without necessarily being wide eyed believers in some honourable quest.
For me, there are a few key things
1. Obviously pay.
My family are the most important thing here, and people pay me money to write code & solve problems for them. Money can be exchanged for goods and services.
2. It's an interesting space.
You've got a global database with row level security for modifications and stored procedures. Everyone uses key based security. On top, the database is slow, those stored procedures have very strict limits and computations need to be heavily optimised. Everything is public. There are now multiple linked databases with different tradeoffs. How do you mix those? How do you ensure safety, security, validity? How do you do off-chain computation and get the results back on chain?
3. It's new.
Do you know what happens if I come up with a great new technical idea in most development? It's either a bad idea for reasons others have discovered already or someone has already implemented it better than I could. It often requires very deep expertise to do something truly new. On the crypto side, I've come up with things that are (as far as I can tell) brand new. I find building to be more fun than configuring, and you need to build new things in this space.
4. It's changing fast.
There are things you can do now you couldn't do 6 months ago, a year ago, two years ago. The space is very active.
I don't know if it'll be the foundation of everything in 10 years, a distant memory of "oh yeah people tried that didn't they" or if I'll be like COBOL programmers fixing legacy weird systems from an ill fated project. All I know is it's _fun_ and _hard_ and people pay me to do it.
For a community that builds so many things just to see if they can, I find it quite surprising that so many coders aren't even curious.
HN has hated Bitcoin since before there was any reason to hate it. In the very early days there was a positive attitude. However, since the price started to reach double digits, the attitude became sharply negative and that has stuck for the last 10 years. Some HN thought leaders declared Bitcoin a tulip bubble when the price was 1000x smaller than it is now.
There are legitimate criticisms of cryptocurrency but the attitude here is more of a hardened loathing punctuated with a minority of more open minded people.
Note that the 4 reasons you've listed have little to do with the technical merits of what you're working on. If anything, your point 2 and 3 talks more about the drawbacks of the technologies you're using rather than their advantages.
I have learned that the more I mention cryptocurrency or even decentralized anything the more likely my comment is to be buried. So I would say cryptocurrency enthusiasts are sort of suppressing themselves.
I have been running a business with payments in micro transactions on Algorand for a few months. It's not something that would be remotely possible without cryptocurrency.
It's true that there are a lot of scams and nonsense, but I know for a fact that there are real artists using smart contracts to sell their art frictionlessly and engage with their community in ways that are again, impossible without this technology.
But to go back to the original point, writing this kind of thing on HN, there is a real chance the comment will be downvoted quite a lot.
There are legit projects. There are many bad projects. HN people generalize and the ones that know the legit projects understand discussing is a waste of time.
> there's seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies, enough that I think its fair to assume its likely true.
Why would you assume that, though?
I've never seen an actual statistic on this. I mean, I'm sure there's greater than zero, but never solid evidence for "a lot".
It's to the point where the increasing anecdotes and ongoing absence of any harder numbers leads me to think it's negligible.
Back here in the world, crypto on a dev CV is a red flag.
I don't feel like those two sentences pose a dichotomy. In the same way that I think Amazon is hell on earth but would very likely work for them simply because working in a capitalist system means you'll always be contributing to harm somewhere, the only difference is in intensity or directness. From my perspective someone can think crypto is a net loss to society and still work on a company that uses it for a multitude of reasons, with circumstance being one of them.
That's nocoalers, not nocoiners. Bitcoin is China's way of exporting coal through the atmosphere. Proof of Waste is what PoW really stands for, and Proof of Stake has always been a pipe dream that's never been delivered, and it has its own terrible problems, like being Oligarchy on Steroids.
Sadly, this seems about right. Both MLM and NFT and ICO tokens are mostly used to dump bad investments onto clueless suckers. Of course, there's also useful uses, which is why I own some crypto myself. But if you design a system to avoid legal oversight as much as possible, then of course there won't be much legal oversight to protect the stupid from intelligent scams.
In the end, that means the whole Web 3.0 and crypto complaints boil down to a simple question:
Should our government protect (idiots|naive investors) from getting scammed?
I'd argue yes, to make society more peaceful and more stable. But one could also argue that this is just the financial survival of the fittest and, hence, a natural rule that suckers get taken advantage of.
>In the nation where you have to put "Caution - Hot" on coffee-to-go cups to avoid being sued
Hate to be that guy but McDonald's got sued over the hot coffee because they continued to serve coffee well above safe temperatures long after valid saftey concerns had been raised. The poor woman recieved 3rd degree burns (something that shouldn't be possible from a spilled beverage). She was publicly vilified for the massive settlement awarded to her when she only asked for reasonable medical costs.
Also the "Caution - Hot" warning wouldn't have prevented her from being able to sue for negligence. From the data America isn't nearly as litigious as many media stories make out. In fact after this minor court case it actually became harder to sue companies in America and arguably resulted in may corporations to be less concerned about their affect on the common good.
> Should our government protect (idiots|naive investors) from getting scammed?
While the answer for me is yes I also dislike the framing of this.
We live in a society that (the US even more than Europe)
1. Over centuries has moved towards more and more privatisation of what used to be commons (land, water, ways, now software), thus forcing people to engage in either business or crime to survive - unless you are born rich
2. Has grown more and more complex to navigate,sometimes by necessity but often via rent seeking (Intuit and taxes) requiring you to spend quite a lot of mental capacity and time to manage it - unless you are rich enough to pay someone to do the work for you
3. Does not really adequately give you the training and time required to acquire these skills - unless you are rich in money enough to afford college and possibly additional training, or have rich/self sacrificing enough parents to navigate college, learn how to separate good free sources from bad free sources etc. (not even bringing in systemic handicaps like lead paint or other cognitively impairing pollution in low income areas)
4. Has grown a hundreds of billion dollar industry around manipulating people, with useful information ever more difficult to distinguish from "sponsored posts" etc. - reinforcing the above 3 points. The swamp of influencers feeding parasocial relationships to monetize as part of that that is especially normalized throughout all of life and entertainment - unless you can afford paying for "high quality" media that doesn't feature them (in cash or in time searching for gems)
and we blame individuals for getting scammed?
All of the above boil down to "if you are already privileged, you can avoid getting scammed" and most of the moralistic arguments people use (greed, stupidity, impulsive,lazy...) are "fuck the poor" in disguise: fuck the poor for having poor impulse control (nevermind lead paint, unresolved trauma because there was no therapist money, not having the time to learn that impulse control before being thrust into work...), fuck the poor for their greed (never mind the fact that high risk games might be the only chance for meaningful social mobility if they work and the whole culture valorizes taking risks and having vision), fuck the poor for being stupid (education costs money, even if the internet gives you info for free you need to sift, sort, learn), fuck the poor for being lazy (nevermind that being poor is expensive due to lack of economizing opportunities and after just breaking even you might already have done a whole day of work).
We are putting up a well oiled, highly funded (sometimes state subsidised) machine of professional nudging, manipulation and technically legal scams against Joe Plumber or Joe Programmer who is just trying to do the right thing and hustle on top of his normal job. I'm not sure we should blame Joe for statistically not being on top in that game
I disagree with the notion that this is "financial survival of the fittest" and "a natural rule". There's absolutely nothing natural in this situation, and even if it was I don't think there's a reason that should be relevant.
Nice, before the DeFi days, similar articles were calling Ethereum a securities fraud vending machine, when all the issuances were called ICOs
I got a kick out of that
I think this article misses for the forest for the trees, or weeds, or looses sight of the depth of this activity for a few VCs. That activity just gets worse ha.
I think its up to the consumers to be more pragmatic in what they buy. VC involvement is not clout, but there is a heavy incentive to assume it is because non-VC involvement is also ripe for quicker disaster. When you try to bring this up in communities, people crowd you out. If you had previously said something nice about a project but noticed these conflicts of interest people will just say "don't FUD your own bags", meaning only say positive things to keep the interest high so that the exit liquidity remains for you too.
Interestingly, I wonder if this how the 1920s were. I like how in the equities market it is possible to be a holder and take a critical position to bring people to highlight an issue and improve on it, but most don't or wouldn't do that either for the same reason: "don't FUD your own bags"
Yes. That is the scam with them involved. We have seen these co-ordinated pump and dump schemes before with Coinbase Ventures, a16z, etc with other tokens like ApeCoin (APE), Internet Computer (ICP), ENS, Compound (COMP) and DeSO (DESO) [0] [1] getting listed immediately after dumping on retail and cashing out.
The web3 crypto VC playbook is that they pretend to care about it up to the minute they use retail and the exchanges as a liquidity event to exit and make a killing out of them.
It is a rigged game which they can never lose. All thanks to and started by the Ethereum ecosystem since the first ICO.
The Web: A VC-funded gig economy of securities fraud
I mean, pets.com? Seriously? It's a bubble waiting to be burst (and it did in 2001) so the Web is morally depraved and the government should come in and make sure only millionaires can invest in them. Makes total sense.
You could easily build on the web in 1999 without trying to peddle your shares to retail investors. Most people did just that.
But on “web3” nobody wants to just build useful or interesting stuff. Instead everybody is looking to sell you their useless thing as an amazing investment. And that’s why it’s both morally obnoxious and tends to run afoul of securities laws.
You can easily build on web3 in 2022 without trying to peddle your tokens to retail investors, too.
But those aren't the projects that you hear about.
It is disingenuous of you to recognize the possibility on the web in 1999 but then characterize people building on web3 as not wanting to build useful or interesting stuff.
I don't think anybody selling Beanie Babies was claiming to be transforming finance and democratizing intellectual property or making any of the many other ludicrous claims in the web3/crypto space. When I look at web3/crypto, at best I see "solutions" in search of a problem, but mostly I see confused techno-utopianism mixed with Beanie Babies and various other scams and empty crazes.
A lot of stuff on the Web sucks (always has), but importantly, there was always a sizeable proportion that didn't (Wikipedia, etc.). Cryptocurrencies are so bad at doing what they originally set out to do (function as currencies in at least some of the ways that currencies are useful), that anything in the space is almost universally exhibiting the problems I mentioned above.
I had the thought a few months ago that crypto is just a meme, a potent viral marketing scheme for the modern era. The gig economy notion of the article resonates strongly with me.
The one thing I would say about the SEC being slow moving, is that the sanctions available to the SEC are quite strong. It's one thing to say that the SEC will never get around to investigating all of these, but really all the SEC has to do is pick one strong case, pursue it to the end.If you win you apply a strong injunction - in this case you just take Chris Dixon aside and say "Hey, we're Fyre festivaling you, you can no longer directly or indirectly participate in the issuance, purchase, offer, or sale of any security, except for your own personal account".
The problem isn't that the SEC is slow. It's that it's slow and gives out speeding tickets.
Readit News
Relative to other speculative manias in history, crypto is a mechanism for mania and speculation. You can't trade tulips on tulips. But you can trade crypto on crypto.
For example, in the British railway mania of the 1840s, many patterns occurred similar to today's crypto frenzy, such as stock exchanges created expressly for the purpose of trading railway stocks and publications to talk about and advertise railway stocks. But railways lack crypto's reflexivity because you can't trade railway stocks on railways. Crypto mechanizes its own speculative mania.
But what's the other side here? Does it even exist? I think it does exist. In my view, a balanced discussion of the pros and cons of crypto often seems to elude the HN community.
HN is a community of technologists, right? So what's the actual technology here? At the root of crypto are two technologies, 1) programmatic public chains that are inexpensive to run and 2) zero-knowledge proofs.
By combining public chains and zero-knowledge proofs, we get an inherently global market, with p2p transactions that scale to all of humanity, where you can send money digitally, similar to handing a $20 bill to a friend. And the transfers can include rigid, sophisticated logic that offers the potential to reduce transaction costs for many kinds of routine economic activity.
So, while it's fair to say that most crypto tokens are effectively trash and crypto mechanizes scams and speculation, it's also unfair to omit discussion of the fundamental innovation, and those who do so will end up on the wrong side of history.
No. It eludes the crypto community. For every well-researched article pointing out flaws, there are exactly zero articles addressing any points in those articles. There's no end to "just join the discords and read up" though.
> At the root of crypto are two technologies, 1) programmatic public chains that are inexpensive to run
Those chains are extremely expensive to run as evidenced by the absolutely dominant one.
> 2) zero-knowledge proofs.
These are not at the "root fo crypto". This is something tacked on to try and solve the 0.00001% of crypto's problems.
> By combining public chains and zero-knowledge proofs, we get an inherently global market, with p2p transactions that scale to all of humanity
No, no we don't.
> it's also unfair to omit discussion of the fundamental innovation, and those who do so will end up on the wrong side of history.
The proof is in the pudding as it were. There's literally nothing in this "fundamental innovation" that can't be done better, faster, cheaper, and on a bigger scale with literally anything else.
- Blockchains are distributed immutable ledgers, and there are very few (if any) useful applications for them
- "programmatic chains" are the worlds slowest, most ineffecient and expensive VM that gets exploited every day because even people programming it don't understand the rules they are writing
No, please stop with this fallacy. I don't know where people get this idea besides from marketing hype. There is no innovation in cryptocurrency. It's perfectly fair to also disregard any claims of innovation, because they're not true. I'll go into the specifics here.
>1) programmatic public chains that are inexpensive to run
The innovation you're taking about here is a database server, blockchains not necessary. AWS and Azure are also an "inexpensive programmable and public" server except you can put anything you want on it, it doesn't have to take the form of an immutable ledger. Blockchains are just strictly worse than everything else.
>2) zero-knowledge proofs.
Also has nothing to do with blockchains, zero knowledge proofs are useful for other purposes besides cryptocurrency, and were invented long before it.
>By combining public chains and zero-knowledge proofs, we get an inherently global market, with p2p transactions that scale to all of humanity, where you can send money digitally, similar to handing a $20 bill to a friend.
No, you don't. By combining those things you might get some structure that would theoretically allow you to do that, but that's only a small portion of building a scalable financial platform. There are still a ton of other services you have to build, which have to exist anyway for any form of online finance regardless of whether you use a blockchain or not. Blockchains are also not "p2p" in any way, by definition they require middlemen to run the chain.
I'm growing tired of reading these comments about cryptocurrency where basically everything is wrong, it's exhausting to deal with the torrent of misleading statements. That should tip any technologist off that something is seriously wrong there. I can't even blame you for making them, the marketing hype is just out of control and is confusing everybody.
And everyone else has to trust them.
With Bitcoin, you are user and "manager" of the server at the same time.
You don't need to trust anyone. And no one needs to trust you.
No single party needs to keep track of transactions and be the source of truth.
That was not possible before and it is the innovation behind blockchain and bitcoin.
What other technology makes use of an immutable ledger, like you said?
Shared Merkle tree ledgers are the technology that actually exists, and has done since the 1990s. It turns out to have very few applications.
https://blog.dshr.org/2022/02/ee380-talk.html - a talk by David Rosenthal, who made a few things using shared Merkle tree ledgers in the 1990s and early 2000s.
The rest of the "technology" is vague promises and get-rich-quick schemes, using technology as the excuse. e.g., you're talking about a "global market" using ZKPs, but no such thing exists - you're stating a "blockchain could" as a "blockchain does". When "could" is a word that means "doesn't."
If you consider gas fees as a cost for running the chain, they absolutely are not inexpensive to run. They may well be the most expensive ledger on earth. Writing the numbers down on-per-page in a book made of gold leaf would probably be cheaper.
But it does surprise that so many technologists are falling into this trap (disregarding the innovation because of the plethora of junk it enables). The value of permission-less platforms and protocols should no be assessed absent of curation. Google, email spam filtering, wikipedia, the web abounds with examples and without curation we would be in a sea of shit.
I don't think I'll ever hook up a wallet to my smartphone in order to use tap-to-pay in some hypothetical future, but I really do believe that crypto can be great at hopping traditional regulatory fences.
If I come across some desirable service offered on the web by a guy in Namibia, they're much more likely to get money from me if they accept something that I can easily acquire and send. I don't even know what Namibia's currency is, but they can list a price in BTC/ETH/DOGE and I can easily make my own judgements on whether it's worth it for me.
Basically the people that should have known better were happy to promote garbage to those who don't know better.
The same thing happened again in 2008 with mortgage derivatives and now I think we're headed for round 3 with crypto.
Even if we ignore the equipment and operational cost, for example the energy cost of mining (dump it on a third party for example), you can't still claim that it is inexpensive to run. At least not without some serious numbers backing up the claim.
Let's say, you tokenized the ownership of your home but a bad actor from the other side of the globe stole the token.
A standard certificate of ownership can still be brought to court in case of fraud, but a token cannot. I mean, you still can bring it to court, have the judge decide in your favor, but the chain is immutable and neither you or the court officials can do anything to revert that. So you'll end-up with a token that does not represent the reality - and that's why standard, traditional certificates exist and are trusted: they represent the rule of the law, something an immutable decentralized chain can't do.
Another example is just what is happening to Russia and its oligarchs. Traditional banks can be forced by the rule of the law to impose sanctions; crypto cannot. So they're just evading those sanctions in plain sight by using crypto. You may side with Russia on the current affairs, but this also applies to terrorist groups, gangs, you name it.
And it goes on and on... if you're a victim of a phishing attack like the one happened recently at OpenSea[1], but instead of signing with your wallet you filled your credit card data into a shady field, you can still contest the purchase with your bank and have your money back. Even if you authorized a one-way money transfer from your bank account, in some countries you can still contest it and eventually have your money back.[2] None of this is available for the victims of the NFT phishing scam.
So, while the technology sure has interesting points, the current use-cases are far from optimal. Society developed trust and trust-chains for a reason. If you're a going to implement this in blockchain, then you'll have to build a non-decentralized* approach from the ground up, that most of the crypto community will bash you for.
* To be fair, many consider the proof-of-stake to be a non-decentralized approach departing from the vision of S. Nakamoto. And some will even argue that the current proof-of-work mining concentration is already centralized.[3]
[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/opensea-phishing-scandal-reve...
[2] https://www-poder360-com-br.translate.goog/justica/globo-gan...
[3] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/03/04/1046636/ethereum...
Unless the token is being used to control some kind of elaborate--and likely magical--boobytrap (to enforce that the owner of the token is the only person who can even step foot on the property), the government would just say that old token was no longer authoritative and that some new token is... which is no different from how a standard title or deed also can't be blindly trusted (as it may have been revoked by the government). And yet, forging your sheets of paper or invalid transfer signatures on the real sheet of paper (how classic titles and deeds work, as in when I signed over ownership of a car once) is way easier than forging this blockchain record, and so this actually still provides a ton of benefit by avoiding cases that might have to go to court in the first place.
That's within a whisker of saying that the entire legal system is subservient to blockchain, and not the other way around.
If so it would appear to be the death-knell for all those use-cases for any official/governmental process to use blockchain... ?
Basically if you recognize that coal is poisoning people for no societal benefit, then it can carry on via momentum for a while, insiders can prop it up for longer than it should, but eventually it'll get crushed and you don't want to be holding the bag when it does.
As far as I can tell, that applies to most crypto. I'm sure there's cool uses, but mostly it seems a way for people to make money from the people who will be caught out when it shuts down.
So the obvious question is, how do you do a 'big short' on this?
The problem with coal is that its externalities are not properly priced in, making it look quite a bit cheaper than it actually is. Much of its cost is being placed on a hidden credit card with an unknown interest rate. If all externalities were priced in coal would probably not be competitive except in places with few other good energy options and in roles where it's hard to replace like bulk virgin steel production.
Crypto has few real value-creating uses outside the original core use cases of easier international wire transfer, some utility in areas without functional banking, black/grey market commerce, and hobbyists/techno-nerds who use it because its cool. Those use cases are real but they are also the use cases that existed in 2008-2009 when Bitcoin launched.
Web3, ICOs, and DeFi all seem to be almost 100% gambling and scams. Every few months I go looking for systems and use cases for crypto other than the original ones mentioned above and all I find is gambling and scams.
I don't think crypto will go to zero, but I think its actual value is very far below its current price. FOMO marketing for various forms of web3 and token shonk is getting increasingly shrill and desperate, which is not a good sign. If I had any of this stuff I'd sell.
Of course remember: it's very hard to call the top of these things. They almost always go higher than anyone expects. Sub-prime mortgages kept going far beyond what anyone thought possible. Regardless, you don't want to be a bag holder when it eventually does crash.
The best way to win in a casino is not to play. The second best, if you've played, is to quit while you are up and ignore the fact that there is a chance it might go higher. Here's some good old fashioned Native American financial advice on this topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXbDB3uEltY
You aren't special. Someone will win big in the casino, but it won't (statistically) be you.
The current implementations are often broken. Downstream sales can skirt the royalty. But that is, like many problems with crypto, a solvable engineering problem.
I call this primary-sale royalty a "good" idea because it seems like an obvious, almost intuitive way to benefit original artists. And it also just clears out mountains of regulation and royalty regime that currently track, enforce and account for royalties, and do a terrible job of it.
The problem is, you can use the same mechanism for anything, such that rich people can bake in an "I continue to get richer" royalty whenever they sell their property.
Both the good and bad side of this mechanism are just one thing you can do with programmable money. Does anybody think it's the only one -- the only new mechanism worth developing?
Financial interactions are entirely within the realm of voluntarily interactions, and those that are not are already considered fraud, and prohibited.
The HN crowd seems to hold a generally negative view on cyptocurrencies and web3 and view it as a bit of scam with no proper use case except to leave someone holding the bag
At the same time there's seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies, enough that I think its fair to assume its likely true.
Does anybody have any insight as to why this is the case? Is somebody missing something?
Add the many scams going on in the web3 space and it's easy to see why most people don't like it.
As a developer who started to turn into crypto recently:
I live in a corrupted country with a corrupted government that has too much power and has no good intentions for its people.
I can easily get crypto tokens or some other form of compensation for doing some work for a crypto company, which usually pays much better than regular work, while exploring new ways of thinking about how money and economy works in the first place.
As a developer I feel enthusiastic about everything crypto can offer, and learning more about Solidity development and inter-chain communications and new scalable layers just excite me even more.
There is not a single reason for me to not love crypto.
It's all about demographics.
Maybe. I hear this a lot too. But as a counterpoint, I happen to live in the USA, and have a pretty good life. I know a LOT of people who have good lives in this relatively uncorrupted society who are going into web3. And who are funded by very well off people in said country.
I'm not saying that web3 can't help people in bad countries. It's that I don't think that's the end goal of a lot of this enthusiasm. Because I don't think those people were trying to help out people in your country before crypto existed (not verified, but I think this is a reasonable belief).
Your government may decide to crack down on crypto, making it difficult to convert to your local currency (as many countries do with USD).
The crypto world in the US may very well be a bubble that will burst at some point.
Crypto companies are overfunded by VCs and offer amazing packages, more than FAANG in many cases, plus the token upside. Who doesn't want to make a quick buck?
Also, it's pretty interesting technology that can be fun to work with. Even if it's useless, it scratches the itch of working on something deeply technical instead of the boring old web technologies.
Let he who is without sin throw the first stone.
The fully remote salaries I've seen recently for Web3 jobs almost makes me want to make the switch.
This absolutely does not mirror my experience. Most Web3 companies, even VC funded, can't offer even close to FAANG.
Do you have an example of such company?
They have potentially no limit on the ceiling for token valuation while a similar company on public market will depend on fundamentals for its valuation.
If you are on a web3 rocketship, the chances of you cashing out is much higher than otherwise similar web2 startup.
Similarly, you also have more control over the direction of the company via DAO voting. You can protect your bags from getting diluted.
Not everyone cares about the moral high ground. Statistically, about 5% of the population don't. So then web3.0 is extremely high pay + downside you don't care about.
? Yes, money.
This is not a dichotomy.
Most people are not ideological and don't care about meta issues.
Even those with opinions can be convinced quickly of something else with a huge paycheque.
Because Crypto is not directly fraudulent, and you can talk about it superficially as being beneficial, well, people will participate.
Money is a great motivator.
There was likely a similar group of people bitching in 1999. The dotcom bubble did happen, and yet dot coms also happened.
The point is that to see the upside, you need to evaluate what new capabilities the tech offers, whether they're interesting, and who is doing the real work (if it exists).
They were also going to change the world (I'm not sure if they specified for the better).
For instance, I believe crypto "dividends" or "yields" are a zero-sum game, diluting the limited savings of have-nots to enrich the haves. For example ETH staking, where to avoid middlemen, you have to stake 32 ETH.
But I believe cryptocurrency as an asset is well worth it, for the competition it provides to national currencies. If these decide to overinflate, crypto provides you with a relatively-uninflated asset (though its value also depends to an extent on the liquidity of national currencies, as well as fickle bandwagon effects).
Then again, given enough pay, I might consider helping some "entrepreneur" of the zero-sum variety.
end goal would be more usage of decentralized staking pools, see Rocket Pool. this way, the ‘middleman’ is a set of smart contracts; the validators (who only require 16ETH) take a slightly higher fee than stakers (who can stake as low as 0.01ETH), for their services rendered (burden of additional maintenance, technical expertise and risk involved with running a validator).
But I do feel that centralized staking (CEX, Lido) poses a risk to the network.
Given their volatilities, cryptocurrencies are neither inflation hedges nor currencies. Somebody with a bunch of USD trying to hedge inflation will buy gold or real estate before they buy cryptocurrencies.
I'm interviewing right now at a large-ish cryptocurrency company. I'm currently an exhausted L6 at a FAANG.
The promise of fewer working hours and no on-call rota is very attractive to me, as well as the ability to start with Go f/time[1] on mostly greenfield[2] projects.
[1] Team I am on has agreed long before I joined to use nothing but Java.
[2] I'm also tired, after decades in the industry, of mostly maintaining existing products. The chance to create new stuff from scratch is very attractive.
> At the same time there's seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies, enough that I think its fair to assume its likely true.
People build plenty of things for companies without necessarily being wide eyed believers in some honourable quest.
For me, there are a few key things
1. Obviously pay.
My family are the most important thing here, and people pay me money to write code & solve problems for them. Money can be exchanged for goods and services.
2. It's an interesting space.
You've got a global database with row level security for modifications and stored procedures. Everyone uses key based security. On top, the database is slow, those stored procedures have very strict limits and computations need to be heavily optimised. Everything is public. There are now multiple linked databases with different tradeoffs. How do you mix those? How do you ensure safety, security, validity? How do you do off-chain computation and get the results back on chain?
3. It's new.
Do you know what happens if I come up with a great new technical idea in most development? It's either a bad idea for reasons others have discovered already or someone has already implemented it better than I could. It often requires very deep expertise to do something truly new. On the crypto side, I've come up with things that are (as far as I can tell) brand new. I find building to be more fun than configuring, and you need to build new things in this space.
4. It's changing fast.
There are things you can do now you couldn't do 6 months ago, a year ago, two years ago. The space is very active.
I don't know if it'll be the foundation of everything in 10 years, a distant memory of "oh yeah people tried that didn't they" or if I'll be like COBOL programmers fixing legacy weird systems from an ill fated project. All I know is it's _fun_ and _hard_ and people pay me to do it.
For a community that builds so many things just to see if they can, I find it quite surprising that so many coders aren't even curious.
There are legitimate criticisms of cryptocurrency but the attitude here is more of a hardened loathing punctuated with a minority of more open minded people.
I have been running a business with payments in micro transactions on Algorand for a few months. It's not something that would be remotely possible without cryptocurrency.
It's true that there are a lot of scams and nonsense, but I know for a fact that there are real artists using smart contracts to sell their art frictionlessly and engage with their community in ways that are again, impossible without this technology.
But to go back to the original point, writing this kind of thing on HN, there is a real chance the comment will be downvoted quite a lot.
Why would you assume that, though?
I've never seen an actual statistic on this. I mean, I'm sure there's greater than zero, but never solid evidence for "a lot".
It's to the point where the increasing anecdotes and ongoing absence of any harder numbers leads me to think it's negligible.
Back here in the world, crypto on a dev CV is a red flag.
In the end, that means the whole Web 3.0 and crypto complaints boil down to a simple question:
Should our government protect (idiots|naive investors) from getting scammed?
I'd argue yes, to make society more peaceful and more stable. But one could also argue that this is just the financial survival of the fittest and, hence, a natural rule that suckers get taken advantage of.
Anyone I know personally who makes NFT or his interested in it is doing it for speculation, not to make art per se.
> But one could also argue that this is just the financial survival of the fittest and, hence, a natural rule that suckers get taken advantage of.
In the nation where you have to put "Caution - Hot" on coffee-to-go cups to avoid being sued, I think the answer to that is self-evident.
Hate to be that guy but McDonald's got sued over the hot coffee because they continued to serve coffee well above safe temperatures long after valid saftey concerns had been raised. The poor woman recieved 3rd degree burns (something that shouldn't be possible from a spilled beverage). She was publicly vilified for the massive settlement awarded to her when she only asked for reasonable medical costs.
Also the "Caution - Hot" warning wouldn't have prevented her from being able to sue for negligence. From the data America isn't nearly as litigious as many media stories make out. In fact after this minor court case it actually became harder to sue companies in America and arguably resulted in may corporations to be less concerned about their affect on the common good.
While the answer for me is yes I also dislike the framing of this.
We live in a society that (the US even more than Europe)
1. Over centuries has moved towards more and more privatisation of what used to be commons (land, water, ways, now software), thus forcing people to engage in either business or crime to survive - unless you are born rich
2. Has grown more and more complex to navigate,sometimes by necessity but often via rent seeking (Intuit and taxes) requiring you to spend quite a lot of mental capacity and time to manage it - unless you are rich enough to pay someone to do the work for you
3. Does not really adequately give you the training and time required to acquire these skills - unless you are rich in money enough to afford college and possibly additional training, or have rich/self sacrificing enough parents to navigate college, learn how to separate good free sources from bad free sources etc. (not even bringing in systemic handicaps like lead paint or other cognitively impairing pollution in low income areas)
4. Has grown a hundreds of billion dollar industry around manipulating people, with useful information ever more difficult to distinguish from "sponsored posts" etc. - reinforcing the above 3 points. The swamp of influencers feeding parasocial relationships to monetize as part of that that is especially normalized throughout all of life and entertainment - unless you can afford paying for "high quality" media that doesn't feature them (in cash or in time searching for gems)
and we blame individuals for getting scammed?
All of the above boil down to "if you are already privileged, you can avoid getting scammed" and most of the moralistic arguments people use (greed, stupidity, impulsive,lazy...) are "fuck the poor" in disguise: fuck the poor for having poor impulse control (nevermind lead paint, unresolved trauma because there was no therapist money, not having the time to learn that impulse control before being thrust into work...), fuck the poor for their greed (never mind the fact that high risk games might be the only chance for meaningful social mobility if they work and the whole culture valorizes taking risks and having vision), fuck the poor for being stupid (education costs money, even if the internet gives you info for free you need to sift, sort, learn), fuck the poor for being lazy (nevermind that being poor is expensive due to lack of economizing opportunities and after just breaking even you might already have done a whole day of work).
We are putting up a well oiled, highly funded (sometimes state subsidised) machine of professional nudging, manipulation and technically legal scams against Joe Plumber or Joe Programmer who is just trying to do the right thing and hustle on top of his normal job. I'm not sure we should blame Joe for statistically not being on top in that game
I got a kick out of that
I think this article misses for the forest for the trees, or weeds, or looses sight of the depth of this activity for a few VCs. That activity just gets worse ha.
I think its up to the consumers to be more pragmatic in what they buy. VC involvement is not clout, but there is a heavy incentive to assume it is because non-VC involvement is also ripe for quicker disaster. When you try to bring this up in communities, people crowd you out. If you had previously said something nice about a project but noticed these conflicts of interest people will just say "don't FUD your own bags", meaning only say positive things to keep the interest high so that the exit liquidity remains for you too.
Interestingly, I wonder if this how the 1920s were. I like how in the equities market it is possible to be a holder and take a critical position to bring people to highlight an issue and improve on it, but most don't or wouldn't do that either for the same reason: "don't FUD your own bags"
Also see here: https://startupsandecon.substack.com/p/you-dont-own-web3-a-c...
The web3 crypto VC playbook is that they pretend to care about it up to the minute they use retail and the exchanges as a liquidity event to exit and make a killing out of them.
It is a rigged game which they can never lose. All thanks to and started by the Ethereum ecosystem since the first ICO.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30725449
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29948397
I mean, pets.com? Seriously? It's a bubble waiting to be burst (and it did in 2001) so the Web is morally depraved and the government should come in and make sure only millionaires can invest in them. Makes total sense.
But on “web3” nobody wants to just build useful or interesting stuff. Instead everybody is looking to sell you their useless thing as an amazing investment. And that’s why it’s both morally obnoxious and tends to run afoul of securities laws.
But those aren't the projects that you hear about.
It is disingenuous of you to recognize the possibility on the web in 1999 but then characterize people building on web3 as not wanting to build useful or interesting stuff.
A lot of stuff on the Web sucks (always has), but importantly, there was always a sizeable proportion that didn't (Wikipedia, etc.). Cryptocurrencies are so bad at doing what they originally set out to do (function as currencies in at least some of the ways that currencies are useful), that anything in the space is almost universally exhibiting the problems I mentioned above.
I had the thought a few months ago that crypto is just a meme, a potent viral marketing scheme for the modern era. The gig economy notion of the article resonates strongly with me.
The problem isn't that the SEC is slow. It's that it's slow and gives out speeding tickets.