I live in Canada and recently invested a small amount in a startup via AngelList RUV. There were two funding options: (1) wire transfer, (2) transfer USDC via Ethereum network. One of these options is cheaper, faster, and more flexible than the other.
Crypto has long been criticized for being gambling and lacking utility. I think utility is finally trickling in, although currently in limited settings. If you look at _all_ of crypto from afar, there is a lot of noise and bullshit. If you zoom into the right applications, there are use cases that are gaining product market fit.
Wire transfers in North America are literally 40 years behind the evolution of bank transfers in EU and UK.
Sending money in Europe is free and increasingly often instantaneous 24/7. It will be very difficult for crypto to reach the level of convenience available on unified infrastructure created through sensible regulation. Lacking that, maybe Americans will have to keep settling for all these clunky, incompatible intermediated patchwork solutions like Zelle and Venmo and USDC-on-Ethereum and whatever.
But that's the point, crypto is a coordination mechanism that in most cases serves as an alternative when you don't have effective and trustworthy centralized institutions. It's pretty clear that (in this case) European financial regulators did a good job coordinating an effective and efficient electronic money transmission system.
But the whole world is not Sweden. Even in America, which is relatively first world with relatively decent institutions, our regulators failed to coordinate a decent electronic money transmission system. Now imagine being in Turkey or LatAm or Sri Lanka. (Or even just being in Europe and needing to interface with anywhere outside the European utopia.) Agree that decentralized protocols come with many inherent inefficiencies and frictions. But when institutions fail, the only alternative are decentralized protocols.
In many ways I see the pro- vs. anti- crypto division coming down to how much people believe in institutions. Most crypto criticisms come down to an appeal to just focus on building better institutions rather than waste mountains of talent on overly complex decentralized protocols. "Instead of all this on-chain stablecoin nonsense, why don't we focus our efforts on electing better financial regulators, who can bring European like money transfers to North America and eventually the globe?"
Whereas I think pro-crypto people (myself included), tend to think of any attempts to change public policy as /dev/null. Most of the world is saddled with horribly dysfunctional institutions, and it's not easy to fix. I have much more confidence in our ability to engineer solutions than mustering the necessary political and social coordination necessary to fix governments, policy, regulators and institutions.
I think Paypal only got off the ground because the US banking system is so amazingly awful (compared to, say, continental Europe). Somewhat sad that it still seems to be the case.
That's the point! Locally, there are great options almost everywhere. In Canada, I can e-transfer (Interac) anyone and the transfer is ~instant. Across borders the solutions are much worse. Crypto is the only payment rail that can realistically reach _everywhere_.
> Sending money in Europe is free and increasingly often instantaneous 24/7. It will be very difficult for crypto to reach the level of convenience available on unified infrastructure created through sensible regulation. Lacking that, maybe Americans will have to keep settling for all these clunky, incompatible intermediated patchwork solutions like Zelle and Venmo and USDC-on-Ethereum and whatever.
While true, I do think there is value in a permissionless protocol that anyone can plug into like this. Anyone in the world can send USDC to someone else (and any bank can integrate with this). The same can't be said for banking systems.
> Lacking that, maybe Americans will have to keep settling for all these clunky, incompatible intermediated patchwork solutions like Zelle and Venmo and USDC-on-Ethereum and whatever.
We must have different definitions of Europe because I live in Romania (which has been a member of the European Union since 2007) and yet even national transfers are not instantaneous if you're doing them in the evening, not to mention the weekend. And don't get me started with transfers to other European countries.
I also think you meant cheap, not free. By the way I find it funny that some banks tax the receiver, so in order to get money, you have to lose money :-)
Maybe it will be like with China and cedit card usage. China just skipped credit cards and does everything in phone. They were behind, now they are leading the pack. Countries embracing crypto could go similar route.
There are probably large differences between countries here, but for me a wire transfer would clearly be the cheaper and easier option. They don't cost anything in fees. Speed is not that great, but usually good enough.
Another option that is often very convenient is the "Lastschrift", I can simply grant a company permission to withdraw money from my account. The protections for the customer are very strong with this, I can revert any withdrawal without any reason, so this is essentially no risk for me.
For those in Canada, the banks and telephone lines were all down at one point. Even if you were on a different internet provider that was up, you bank would still be down.
So the 'call my bank' option won't work here and wire transfer is no different to transferring money in crypto as they are both irreversible.
But I don't know how entering a .eth/.sol/etc address or scanning a QR code to send USDC over is harder than typing in the sort code, account number, IBAN number, etc to do a wire transfer.
For me it's the opposite. I don't want to talk to someone in order to send money. Also, you never know how long/much it'll take to wire. Sometimes it's done free on the same day, other times it gets double charged and takes 2 days for the money to arrive.
Do you live in North America? I would challenge anyone in Canada/US that claims it's easier to initiate a wire transfer (with zero ability to track progress) vs. send USDC to an ETH address.
Weird, I now find transferring money between accounts at different banking institutions is incredibly easy. My credit union provides me with free access to the services of EFT Canada via which I can move money around any canadian banks with $0 in fees. If I have to move internationally, I go via https://oanda.paydirect.io/ -- Oanda started out as a currency trading platform. Being able to send a wire transfer in USD to China from my couch in 5 minutes with very little in fees is pretty awesome. Previously it took 2 hours of driving into the city to get to the nearest branch of my credit union plus another hour of waiting for the teller to figure out the wire transfer. And all this has happened without any cryptocurrencies involved. Look around for modern financial services, as they do exist!
It's difficult to comprehend just how bad traditional finance is at this unless you regularly experience it. No, I'm not talking about chafing under regulations against doing crime -- the number of unforced idiotic bureaucratic errors is absolutely off the charts, in addition to being very slow and very expensive.
It's not kicking in. The utility was always there and very few people/institutions have any interest in using it. Whatever fee/time costs are inherent in the current system are obviously worth whatever security and regulatory oversight they offer. Enough stable coins have collapsed to remove whatever credibility the entire idea of a stable coin may have.
International transfers might be different but for domestic transfers, most countries outside of the west have very robust systems already. India’s UPI puts any crypto alternative to shame with the speed, transaction volume, fees and ease of use.
Sending someone USDC for international payments is admittedly much easier, but you’re likely going to run into expensive regulation on that front since it carries too much money laundering risk
Within Canada Interac e-Transfer is fast and easy (except when Rogers is down). Takes a few seconds to go from one bank via email, click on the link and have it in another bank.
This is the story in most countries with good economies: Local transfers are free for private individuals up to a certain amount. Exceed the bounds and you'll be offered a paid solution. So if one end of this system pays for the other, and the other thinks it's free, you're just paying indirectly via price adjustments.
Receiving CHF (Swiss Francs) via an IBAN transfer 1) cost a lot, 2) take several days.
Switching to a traditional money transfer provider requires KYC'ing.
I was once denied because my website seemed sketchy. It just has my company's name and a link to my personal homepage. I already have customers, so my first motivation to create a website was so that money transfer providers think I'm actually running a business and will allow payments.
With one single integration, AngelList can receive USDC from anyone, anywhere in the world. It doesn't matter if you can transfer CHF very cheaply locally.
I honestly was expecting you to say that the bank transfer was the cheaper, faster, option. It is here in Europe. It involves: login to my bank app, enter name, account and amount, send, and sometimes adding 1 or 2 verification codes depending on the bank. It’s really convenient.
I haven’t used wire transfers in 10 years. Costs were around $30 for each $1000 at the time. I use wise.com, and it’s less than $3 per $1000. It’s gotten cheaper as well over time I’ve used the service. Not sure if they use crypto in the background but they certainly don’t advertise it.
Just raised a funding round, and about half the investors used USDC and half used wire transfers.
On "famously expensive and slow" Ethereum, the USDC transfers took 15 seconds and cost under $2. Oh and even better, I was able to just use a simple human readable [X].eth address, instead of an incomprehensible string of routing number digits.
And yet it was faster / cheaper / easier for the OP vs the traditional banking mechanisms. That says more about the US and Canadian banks than anything else.
Bitcoin has lost more than 80% of its value at least four times in its short 10yr existence. It, and all other crypto, are highly volatile. Every time they go through one of these stages, people publish articles like these, asking if this time is the end.
But the builders just keep building, advancing the tech and extending its capabilities. Largely because cryptocurrencies are a fascinating engineering problem, which combine cryptography and distributed systems in a way never done before, and which also incorporate programming language theory, networking, computer and network security, economics, and law into the mix. It’s one of the most multi-disciplinary technologies there is. Like catnip for engineers, they just can’t stop building this stuff.
Articles like this all read the same way. Sure he can frame his student as some kind of expert, but clearly if she is referencing youtube videos about price action in crypto she doesn't really have an understanding worth framing your criticism around. For all of these articles, it feels everyone's idea of crypto does not extend beyond dunking on stuff dumb retail meme traders (who have no idea what is going on) say on twitter instead of the people actually building the technology. I'm not even an expert but even I can see the way everyone approaches it in such poor faith is like building a caricature of what they think crypto is to justify their feelings towards it.
Right. The real measure is not % of loss from top-value, rather it should be # of people that both don't understand the technology & have lost money speculating on it (i.e. how many people bought into hype and got burned)
There's a finite amount of people to buy-in next cycle
Saddest thing about Crypto even more than the energy cost is the human minds it consumed. I heard people saying that Crypto is what bright graduate students want to focus on and that just too bad.
If you want to finance the un-financed or create decentralized finance go into fintech, crypto is just a bad implementation of fintech...
If you want to change the world go into Biotech or Energy tech.. the next thing to change humanity is probably a better battery not a better foreign exchange market...
And if you just want to get rich by taking money from fools I would recommend setting up an online casino, there are companies that sell white labeled platforms for online casinos and those extract money from poor people with 10th of the cost to the rest of humanity and takes way less effort to set up!
oh no, engineers will start to talk about cryptography, privacy preservation, zero-knowledge proofs, distributed systems, Sybil resistance, game theory - instead of talking about the next hot frontend framework. /s
Centralized exchanges may be consuming minds - like those people who have only ever interacted with crypto through buying a shitcoin on Coinbase and hoping it will go up next week, and think they have a good understanding of what crypto and the blockchain is.
"This is all very simple in practice, the blockchain is barely useful, crypto coins and NFTs have very low utility"
Yes. FOR NOW. But public decentralised blockchains have interesting properties (enabling ownership , Liquidity , composability) and lots of smart people are trying to use those properties to build interesting apps.
These apps are not there yet. I am optimistic that some good apps will be launched in next few years that make use of those unique properties enabled by decentralised public blockchains.
The only thing a blockchain can do is a cryptocurrency.
The cryptocurrency is the only application that works because transactions are performative writings on the blockchain: they define truth. Once it is written on a blockchain that Alice has transferred X tokens to Bob, it instantly becomes a fact by definition, so you can trust what is written on the blockchain.
In any other application, what's written on the blockchain concerns stuff that are external to it. And what's written can thus only be valid if an external (and necessarily trusted, whether you want it or not) third-party can enforce or make what's written on the blockchain to be true. This means that any other application cannot actually exists in the decentralized and fully adversarial setting that would require the use of a blockchain: there is always another, more simple, more elegant, more efficient solution that can be built on top of the trust that must exists somewhere to make things work.
Also, a blockchain needs its cryptocurrency to actually work because there has to be an incentive to participate in the consensus mechanism whether it is PoW ou PoS or other variants, and the incentive cannot be external to the blockchain otherwise you need to trust the third-party which controls it.
Blockchains and cryptocurrencies are basically the solution to their own problem, and to nothing else.
Bitcoin is absolute garbage and in theory any critique is good, but it bothers me that half of the points in this article aren't even internally logically consistent:
> “Blockchain is just like the early internet”. No, it isn’t. Satoshi Nakamoto’s paper was published in October 2008 ... <proceeds to compare age of Bitcoin to the age of some modern tech corps>.
Nothing about the original statement is predicated on the age of the tech. Even if it did, I don't see what modern tech corps have to do with anything - they didn't build the internet. Also, on age, the early internet dates back to the 60s and was still considered "early" 30+ years later.
> There are centralisation and technical problems with these solutions, but let’s ignore those for now, and call these systems for what they are. Second layers act as a reminder that the original networks cannot scale, and need a second network on top of the network to operate. This is an admission of failure.
If we ignore the technical problems, 2nd-layer seem like a practical solution to a problem. Why is that a failure?
(now I know that they DO have technical problems - so maybe let's talk about those specifically, instead of making weird nonsensical statements)
> “Bitcoin is digital gold”. It isn’t, gold is gold, it requires no maintenance fee, once it’s mined [...] Bitcoin [...] need to be maintained by miners using electricity [...] at least to keep the mining running.
Why is mining excluded for gold and not for Bitcoin in your analogy?
---
As for my own opinions...
> Concluding, will crypto die?
This is two questions:
1. Will the crypto market die? Hopefully, though I'm less than optimistic.
2. Will blockchain tech die? Of course not. It's not very useful but it has niche applications - there's plenty of obscure tech that's kept around by enthusiasts, so I think we can be sure that even after the last cryptobro is bankrupted, there'll still be a group of geeks somewhere hacking on the blockchain for fun.
> Even if it did, I don't see what modern tech corps have to do with anything - they didn't build the internet. Also, on age, the early internet dates back to the 60s and was still considered "early" 30+ years later.
I think the tech companies are relevant because they pivoted to find useful applications on top of that basic infrastructure, which the hundreds of blockchain companies have failed to do. AOL made millions even even people were held up by dialup and other limitations, for example, because things like chat were popular and low bandwidth.
The early internet comparisons are complicated by the history of computing – adoption was slow when computers filled a large room and cost millions, for example - but I think that has a similar story. Even when a PC cost as much as a car and you were looking at 300 bps modems on phone lines billed by the hour, people found things worth paying for and there were profitable companies with fairly large subscriber bases by the late 1970s. There were people who met online and were grandparents before smartphones became common!
In contrast, blockchains were globally available on day one with no constraints other than their design limitations. There’s no problem which you could point to like a telecom monopoly, the severe hardware limitations prior to the mid-90s, etc. which would keep popular usage low.
The limit on Bitcoin that I saw early on was market cap, liquidity, and stability. As the first two rise, so should the third. It's been a long grind to the market cap today and it still has a ways to go.
But to build up that momentum and trust takes a lot of time.
I'm not necessarily saying Bitcoin should do this or that I desire it. Just stating one reason why it takes time.
Regarding (1), the real statement here is, "many of us were there at the start of the Web, it was evident that it was going to change the world, and it was usable from the start." And it's mostly about the the Web (but you may include things like The Well, which were promising from the start.) The point is really about immediately apparent use. And, if you're going to date the Web back to the humble beginnings of ARPANET in the early 1970s, you've to include hashes published in the NYT classifieds in the 1970s/1980s for crypto, as well.
Regarding (2), why not have a functional implementation right from the beginning? (Analogously, why have a really bad OS fixed by the application layer?)
The point in (3) is really about availability and value in times of crisis. Gold is already mined, as you hold it.
This is all pretty arbitrary. In the context of pure engineering timelines, you don’t get to just pick arbitrary starting points.
The Internet took decades to reach “I can buy cat food from my home PC” because that’s how long it took the underlying computing and networking technologies to go from the first recognizable proto-technologies to the point where they enabled mass-market usage. If you start your clock in 1994 (or 2007) you can make that time look shorter, but it doesn’t change anything.
Similarly Uber was able to launch a GPS-based smartphone app only a few years after the first smartphone, because the technologies of 3G cellular, OS, portable computing, GUI, GPS, distributed systems etc. were all extremely mature by the time the smartphone launched. But if you measure from earlier points in the “portable computing” timeline you can make Uber look like a multi-decade pipe dream.
There’s no reason to believe that the technical barriers facing cryptocurrency (scaling, UI, key management) will follow dramatically slower or faster tech development curves than those previous technologies. There are still plenty of reasons to question whether there’s a “killer app” once the tech issues are sorted out, but they clearly aren’t yet.
To be clear, I'm not disagreeing with the intent behind the article, I just think the execution is exceptionally poor. If you're going to argue against something, make your arguments compelling (your comment's first point is, the author's wasn't).
On your second & third points:
2: Improving tech over time is good. Creating perfect tech on day 1 isn't realistic. The early internet was built on a lot of tech we no longer use (or are a attempting to move away from)
3: The "I already have gold but no bitcoin in a time of crisis" qualifier seems odd and contrived. Gold is a resource valued for its scarcity, Bitcoin is an attempt to move away from artificial scarcity of fiat to mathematically guaranteed scarcity. Ultimately they share problems: mining of physical goods is environmentally destructive and tying economic prosperity to inflating resource value based on scarcity instead of utility is also ultimately problematic for society in the long term. So the analogy does work -they're fundamentally very comparable. The primary differentiators are (a) the scale of cryptomining is greater per-unit than for physical resources (+ transactional impact), and (b) Bitcoin's got a whole load of extra bad problems that gold doesn't: e.g. instability.
Crypto is basically gambling, and gambling is alive and well. This is why I don't see crypto dying anytime soon. It will die when a better gamble comes along.
Crypto in its current form is worse than gambling.
With gambling, unless it's illegally rigged, you know your expected value will be say $0.90 for every $1 you put in.
However, in return, there is a possibility that you may have a one in million chance of getting back $100 for the $1 you put in.
Crypto, on the other hand, is a Ponzi scheme. It has no internal value and the current owners of crypto are paid entirely through the money brought in by the future owners of crypto.
Now, to be completely fair, I don't think the majority of crypto backers perceive it as a Ponzi scheme. There were many people working in the space (maybe even the overwhelming majority, although that's unlikely to be true anymore), who actually believed that Bitcoin had real value because it could become a real currency. Similarly, there are people who actually believe that Smart Contracts, and NFTs are actual useful technologies.
The problem, however, is that
(a) none of those technologies have panned out, possibly because blockchain simply does not solve the problems people actually face...it solves the problem of "What if the entity who owns the database we are recording our transactions in is unreliable". In practice, this does not seem to be a major problem at all, and further, blockchain appears to be a terrible way to solve this problem.
(b) Even if the technologies are useful, the limited tokens and the fact that they are largely hoarded by early adopters, simply serves to enrich those early adopters, which drastically reduces the utility of any crypto based technologies for future users, the ones who are actually using the technology. Crypto tokens are an implicit tax on technology. It would be like if Google was invented, but to use Google you necessarily had to pay $0.10 every search, but that cost is ridiculously dynamic, often jumping up to $1/search as well. Google would never take off and it would impose an insane tax on everyone else, and society as a whole.
The latter is why crypto in its current form isn't just a successful/unsuccessful tech, its an actively society damaging technology.
Bitcoin miners consume electricity to provide fast and affordable assay. For small value Bitcoin transfers, lightning network is even cheaper and faster.
The internet didn't really take off until the web, but once the web was there it completely exploded from there on out. Comparing to the web makes bitcoin look pathetic scratching around for a problem for its solution over a decade later.
If you're all about Second layer scaling, why not just use existing second layers like VISA? If you're transacting via a trusted second layer to provide scaling, you might as well have that as a layer over the dollar, or gold, or other stable asset.
Rollups have a few properties that are distinct from a centralized VISA system. One is that they are cryptographically verifiable, with this data posted onto Ethereum. Another is that they often include permissionless traits - such as L1 smart contract calls that allow users to “force” transactions from L1 to L2 and back even if the centralized sequencer is trying to censor or block the user’s transaction. In this way, you can always withdraw from a rollup L2 back to Ethereum just by signing with your key.
This goes in hand with forkability - lots of rollups are open source - and composability. You can withdraw your L2 tokens back to L1, and put them in another rollup. If VISA or PayPal blocks your account, you are stuck.
The web is the wrong analogy/comparison for Bitcoin. Bitcoin was never designed or intended to be anything like the web. It was designed to be a money and payments system, no more no less. If you must compare it to anything, compare it to dollars, euro, yen, gold coins, etc.
You may be thinking of Ethereum and any other “crypto” claiming to be “Web 3”, where they want to store and run entire websites on their distributed database. But that’s not Bitcoin.
Sure, “blockchain is just like the early internet” is a bad argument, and one that’s used by some proponents. But if you give it a more charitable interpretation, such as “Not all successful technology is widely adopted within a decade of its inception”, it’s not quite as easy to knock down. Even VR went through (is still going through?) a long winter.
The rest of the points are in a similar vein, picking the worst, most literal interpretations of the arguments. Of course only gold is gold, the argument is that Bitcoin might be used as reserve currency.
VCs are pouring money into this space. Do they care about adoption? Nope. They know that this largely unregulated, liquidity challenged space that’s too technically complex for the average rube is the perfect ground to make wild, wild returns.
Unless something changes drastically on the regulation front, the story will repeat itself. VCs and early adopters will buy tokens in the “ice age”.
Come next cycle, the media will start hyping up crypto again, bringing the retail rubes pouring in. And then the VCs and early adopters will walk away with their 50x returns, leaving retail with the bags
Readit News
Crypto has long been criticized for being gambling and lacking utility. I think utility is finally trickling in, although currently in limited settings. If you look at _all_ of crypto from afar, there is a lot of noise and bullshit. If you zoom into the right applications, there are use cases that are gaining product market fit.
Sending money in Europe is free and increasingly often instantaneous 24/7. It will be very difficult for crypto to reach the level of convenience available on unified infrastructure created through sensible regulation. Lacking that, maybe Americans will have to keep settling for all these clunky, incompatible intermediated patchwork solutions like Zelle and Venmo and USDC-on-Ethereum and whatever.
But the whole world is not Sweden. Even in America, which is relatively first world with relatively decent institutions, our regulators failed to coordinate a decent electronic money transmission system. Now imagine being in Turkey or LatAm or Sri Lanka. (Or even just being in Europe and needing to interface with anywhere outside the European utopia.) Agree that decentralized protocols come with many inherent inefficiencies and frictions. But when institutions fail, the only alternative are decentralized protocols.
In many ways I see the pro- vs. anti- crypto division coming down to how much people believe in institutions. Most crypto criticisms come down to an appeal to just focus on building better institutions rather than waste mountains of talent on overly complex decentralized protocols. "Instead of all this on-chain stablecoin nonsense, why don't we focus our efforts on electing better financial regulators, who can bring European like money transfers to North America and eventually the globe?"
Whereas I think pro-crypto people (myself included), tend to think of any attempts to change public policy as /dev/null. Most of the world is saddled with horribly dysfunctional institutions, and it's not easy to fix. I have much more confidence in our ability to engineer solutions than mustering the necessary political and social coordination necessary to fix governments, policy, regulators and institutions.
While true, I do think there is value in a permissionless protocol that anyone can plug into like this. Anyone in the world can send USDC to someone else (and any bank can integrate with this). The same can't be said for banking systems.
FedNow is supposed to launch in 2023.
https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....
Canadians don't live in the same country as Americans.
Canadians don't have the same banks as Americans.
Canadians can do money transfers instantly between any bank using e-transfer.
He was talking about transferring money out of the Canadian network of banks to a foreign entity (guessing based on it being denominated in USD).
As a European can you transfer money to, say, Vietnam without using clunky 40 year old technology like wires?
I also think you meant cheap, not free. By the way I find it funny that some banks tax the receiver, so in order to get money, you have to lose money :-)
Another option that is often very convenient is the "Lastschrift", I can simply grant a company permission to withdraw money from my account. The protections for the customer are very strong with this, I can revert any withdrawal without any reason, so this is essentially no risk for me.
I think the assumption a lot of people in crypto make is that everyone has a crypto account/wallet setup.
So the 'call my bank' option won't work here and wire transfer is no different to transferring money in crypto as they are both irreversible.
But I don't know how entering a .eth/.sol/etc address or scanning a QR code to send USDC over is harder than typing in the sort code, account number, IBAN number, etc to do a wire transfer.
You're going to be the edge case for a long time.
Sending someone USDC for international payments is admittedly much easier, but you’re likely going to run into expensive regulation on that front since it carries too much money laundering risk
Receiving CHF (Swiss Francs) via an IBAN transfer 1) cost a lot, 2) take several days.
Switching to a traditional money transfer provider requires KYC'ing.
I was once denied because my website seemed sketchy. It just has my company's name and a link to my personal homepage. I already have customers, so my first motivation to create a website was so that money transfer providers think I'm actually running a business and will allow payments.
On "famously expensive and slow" Ethereum, the USDC transfers took 15 seconds and cost under $2. Oh and even better, I was able to just use a simple human readable [X].eth address, instead of an incomprehensible string of routing number digits.
A CBDC will supplant most use cases for crypto simply by being a practical currency.
What will be left is pretty much what you have now --- criminal activity, anarchist cult and naive speculation.
But the builders just keep building, advancing the tech and extending its capabilities. Largely because cryptocurrencies are a fascinating engineering problem, which combine cryptography and distributed systems in a way never done before, and which also incorporate programming language theory, networking, computer and network security, economics, and law into the mix. It’s one of the most multi-disciplinary technologies there is. Like catnip for engineers, they just can’t stop building this stuff.
There's a finite amount of people to buy-in next cycle
If you want to finance the un-financed or create decentralized finance go into fintech, crypto is just a bad implementation of fintech... If you want to change the world go into Biotech or Energy tech.. the next thing to change humanity is probably a better battery not a better foreign exchange market...
And if you just want to get rich by taking money from fools I would recommend setting up an online casino, there are companies that sell white labeled platforms for online casinos and those extract money from poor people with 10th of the cost to the rest of humanity and takes way less effort to set up!
First result in google, not an endorsement [1] https://www.softswiss.com/white-label-solution/
oh no, engineers will start to talk about cryptography, privacy preservation, zero-knowledge proofs, distributed systems, Sybil resistance, game theory - instead of talking about the next hot frontend framework. /s
Centralized exchanges may be consuming minds - like those people who have only ever interacted with crypto through buying a shitcoin on Coinbase and hoping it will go up next week, and think they have a good understanding of what crypto and the blockchain is.
said some electric car manufacturer.
At some point value and utility always converge.
A good heuristic to predict the value of something: would you get them if they were free of charge?
The only difficult thing is to predict when the convergence occurs.
The asymptotic value of Bitcoin is $0.
Yes. FOR NOW. But public decentralised blockchains have interesting properties (enabling ownership , Liquidity , composability) and lots of smart people are trying to use those properties to build interesting apps.
These apps are not there yet. I am optimistic that some good apps will be launched in next few years that make use of those unique properties enabled by decentralised public blockchains.
The cryptocurrency is the only application that works because transactions are performative writings on the blockchain: they define truth. Once it is written on a blockchain that Alice has transferred X tokens to Bob, it instantly becomes a fact by definition, so you can trust what is written on the blockchain.
In any other application, what's written on the blockchain concerns stuff that are external to it. And what's written can thus only be valid if an external (and necessarily trusted, whether you want it or not) third-party can enforce or make what's written on the blockchain to be true. This means that any other application cannot actually exists in the decentralized and fully adversarial setting that would require the use of a blockchain: there is always another, more simple, more elegant, more efficient solution that can be built on top of the trust that must exists somewhere to make things work.
Also, a blockchain needs its cryptocurrency to actually work because there has to be an incentive to participate in the consensus mechanism whether it is PoW ou PoS or other variants, and the incentive cannot be external to the blockchain otherwise you need to trust the third-party which controls it.
Blockchains and cryptocurrencies are basically the solution to their own problem, and to nothing else.
Why is it so difficult to find utility with this "tech"?
As long are you are not a criminal, ownership and liquidity are not huge pain, what is the real, tangible benefit of decentralized banking?
I am not convinced that monetary transactions should be above the Law, and for them to be lawful they have to be centrally regulated in some ways.
> “Blockchain is just like the early internet”. No, it isn’t. Satoshi Nakamoto’s paper was published in October 2008 ... <proceeds to compare age of Bitcoin to the age of some modern tech corps>.
Nothing about the original statement is predicated on the age of the tech. Even if it did, I don't see what modern tech corps have to do with anything - they didn't build the internet. Also, on age, the early internet dates back to the 60s and was still considered "early" 30+ years later.
> There are centralisation and technical problems with these solutions, but let’s ignore those for now, and call these systems for what they are. Second layers act as a reminder that the original networks cannot scale, and need a second network on top of the network to operate. This is an admission of failure.
If we ignore the technical problems, 2nd-layer seem like a practical solution to a problem. Why is that a failure?
(now I know that they DO have technical problems - so maybe let's talk about those specifically, instead of making weird nonsensical statements)
> “Bitcoin is digital gold”. It isn’t, gold is gold, it requires no maintenance fee, once it’s mined [...] Bitcoin [...] need to be maintained by miners using electricity [...] at least to keep the mining running.
Why is mining excluded for gold and not for Bitcoin in your analogy?
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As for my own opinions...
> Concluding, will crypto die?
This is two questions:
1. Will the crypto market die? Hopefully, though I'm less than optimistic.
2. Will blockchain tech die? Of course not. It's not very useful but it has niche applications - there's plenty of obscure tech that's kept around by enthusiasts, so I think we can be sure that even after the last cryptobro is bankrupted, there'll still be a group of geeks somewhere hacking on the blockchain for fun.
I think the tech companies are relevant because they pivoted to find useful applications on top of that basic infrastructure, which the hundreds of blockchain companies have failed to do. AOL made millions even even people were held up by dialup and other limitations, for example, because things like chat were popular and low bandwidth.
The early internet comparisons are complicated by the history of computing – adoption was slow when computers filled a large room and cost millions, for example - but I think that has a similar story. Even when a PC cost as much as a car and you were looking at 300 bps modems on phone lines billed by the hour, people found things worth paying for and there were profitable companies with fairly large subscriber bases by the late 1970s. There were people who met online and were grandparents before smartphones became common!
In contrast, blockchains were globally available on day one with no constraints other than their design limitations. There’s no problem which you could point to like a telecom monopoly, the severe hardware limitations prior to the mid-90s, etc. which would keep popular usage low.
But to build up that momentum and trust takes a lot of time.
I'm not necessarily saying Bitcoin should do this or that I desire it. Just stating one reason why it takes time.
Regarding (2), why not have a functional implementation right from the beginning? (Analogously, why have a really bad OS fixed by the application layer?)
The point in (3) is really about availability and value in times of crisis. Gold is already mined, as you hold it.
The Internet took decades to reach “I can buy cat food from my home PC” because that’s how long it took the underlying computing and networking technologies to go from the first recognizable proto-technologies to the point where they enabled mass-market usage. If you start your clock in 1994 (or 2007) you can make that time look shorter, but it doesn’t change anything.
Similarly Uber was able to launch a GPS-based smartphone app only a few years after the first smartphone, because the technologies of 3G cellular, OS, portable computing, GUI, GPS, distributed systems etc. were all extremely mature by the time the smartphone launched. But if you measure from earlier points in the “portable computing” timeline you can make Uber look like a multi-decade pipe dream.
There’s no reason to believe that the technical barriers facing cryptocurrency (scaling, UI, key management) will follow dramatically slower or faster tech development curves than those previous technologies. There are still plenty of reasons to question whether there’s a “killer app” once the tech issues are sorted out, but they clearly aren’t yet.
That's easy to say in hindsight, but the utility of the internet was debated as hotly back then as the utility of cryptocurrency is today.
> By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-eff...
On your second & third points:
2: Improving tech over time is good. Creating perfect tech on day 1 isn't realistic. The early internet was built on a lot of tech we no longer use (or are a attempting to move away from)
3: The "I already have gold but no bitcoin in a time of crisis" qualifier seems odd and contrived. Gold is a resource valued for its scarcity, Bitcoin is an attempt to move away from artificial scarcity of fiat to mathematically guaranteed scarcity. Ultimately they share problems: mining of physical goods is environmentally destructive and tying economic prosperity to inflating resource value based on scarcity instead of utility is also ultimately problematic for society in the long term. So the analogy does work -they're fundamentally very comparable. The primary differentiators are (a) the scale of cryptomining is greater per-unit than for physical resources (+ transactional impact), and (b) Bitcoin's got a whole load of extra bad problems that gold doesn't: e.g. instability.
With gambling, unless it's illegally rigged, you know your expected value will be say $0.90 for every $1 you put in.
However, in return, there is a possibility that you may have a one in million chance of getting back $100 for the $1 you put in.
Crypto, on the other hand, is a Ponzi scheme. It has no internal value and the current owners of crypto are paid entirely through the money brought in by the future owners of crypto.
Now, to be completely fair, I don't think the majority of crypto backers perceive it as a Ponzi scheme. There were many people working in the space (maybe even the overwhelming majority, although that's unlikely to be true anymore), who actually believed that Bitcoin had real value because it could become a real currency. Similarly, there are people who actually believe that Smart Contracts, and NFTs are actual useful technologies.
The problem, however, is that
(a) none of those technologies have panned out, possibly because blockchain simply does not solve the problems people actually face...it solves the problem of "What if the entity who owns the database we are recording our transactions in is unreliable". In practice, this does not seem to be a major problem at all, and further, blockchain appears to be a terrible way to solve this problem.
(b) Even if the technologies are useful, the limited tokens and the fact that they are largely hoarded by early adopters, simply serves to enrich those early adopters, which drastically reduces the utility of any crypto based technologies for future users, the ones who are actually using the technology. Crypto tokens are an implicit tax on technology. It would be like if Google was invented, but to use Google you necessarily had to pay $0.10 every search, but that cost is ridiculously dynamic, often jumping up to $1/search as well. Google would never take off and it would impose an insane tax on everyone else, and society as a whole.
The latter is why crypto in its current form isn't just a successful/unsuccessful tech, its an actively society damaging technology.
People have been doing highly speculative investment in many different areas and this is clearly not something that will die.
Crypto has been a fantastic vehicle for that because of the hype and the lack of regulation, but this won't last, people can't be fooled forever.
Of course there will be other vehicles, hopefully less destructive than this one...
because: "Bitcoin needs to be maintained by miners using electricity" like they say?
Gold doesn't need continued mining to continue being gold.
If you're all about Second layer scaling, why not just use existing second layers like VISA? If you're transacting via a trusted second layer to provide scaling, you might as well have that as a layer over the dollar, or gold, or other stable asset.
This goes in hand with forkability - lots of rollups are open source - and composability. You can withdraw your L2 tokens back to L1, and put them in another rollup. If VISA or PayPal blocks your account, you are stuck.
You may be thinking of Ethereum and any other “crypto” claiming to be “Web 3”, where they want to store and run entire websites on their distributed database. But that’s not Bitcoin.
1. Its harder to store gold
2. Its harder to verify the integrity of gold
3. Its harder to transfer gold
The rest of the points are in a similar vein, picking the worst, most literal interpretations of the arguments. Of course only gold is gold, the argument is that Bitcoin might be used as reserve currency.
VCs are pouring money into this space. Do they care about adoption? Nope. They know that this largely unregulated, liquidity challenged space that’s too technically complex for the average rube is the perfect ground to make wild, wild returns.
Unless something changes drastically on the regulation front, the story will repeat itself. VCs and early adopters will buy tokens in the “ice age”.
Come next cycle, the media will start hyping up crypto again, bringing the retail rubes pouring in. And then the VCs and early adopters will walk away with their 50x returns, leaving retail with the bags