Bitcoin failed as a currency, and as that became realized, institutional investors pivoted to the "digital gold" scam, to keep people long, while they divest or hedge. The two reasons why it failed as a currency are transaction latency, and lack of fungibility. Transaction privacy is necessary for fungibility. Both of those are just technical problems; I predict that a distributed ledger currency with private transactions like Monero, but a faster consensus algorithm like Avalanche or Hedera will become popular in the next decade. It's likely to be an Ethereum L2.

That is just the currency aspect of distributed ledgers. It's just one use case that we don't yet have the technology to properly address. The exciting thing that distributed ledgers enable is cryptographic institutions. These technologies allow us to solve coordination problems more easily than ever before. Democracies, businesses, communities, projects can all be coordinated better and more honestly using distributed ledgers. It's not an overstatement to say that distributed ledgers are as big of an advancement for human coordination as democracy was.

If you've been soured on these technologies because most of the currencies built with them are scams, I would encourage you to learn about them as if they were just incredibly robust databases that even governments would struggle to take down. Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn't involve money.

The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me. Maybe it goes to show how few people understand economics and anthropology and how dunning-krueger can happen to anyone.

Now the uninformed gambling on futuristic sounding hokum? THAT is easy to understand.

That being said, I'm sorry the author had to go through this experience, the road of life is often filled with unexpected twists and turns.

"Everyone knows in {{BUSINESS_TYPE}} there is no real privacy".

Be it fintech, AI or social media. You give them a free pass with being flippant about companies respecting privacy.

Being flippant about anyone being careless about our privacy is doing us as a society and injustice. We should demand privacy, not laugh at the notion of privacy.

Even if you pretend that the classifier respect anonymity, if I pay for the inference, I would expect that it would be a closed tube with my privacy respected. If at least it was for "safety" checks, I don't like that but I would almost understand, now it is for them to have "marketing data".

Imagine, and regarding the state of the world it might come soon, that you have whatsapp or telegram that inspect all the messages that you send to give reports like:

- 20% of our users speak about their health issues

- 30% of messages are about annoying coworkers

- 15% are messages comparing dick sizes

But then again, so do big Eve Online battles.