Let me ask this then - say a newer crypto project succeeds and works as advertised. What then? What specific future applications make you excited about it, besides trading crypto for crypto?
People ask this over and over, and rather than "you could do x, y, and z" what I always seem to hear are vague emotional appeals - "the possibilities are limitless", "we didn't understand the future of the internet / the smartphone / Facebook / The Beatles / Jesus when they started either", "it's not for everyone but if you're selling cocaine in Venezuela it's indispensible", "well currency/tech X is horrible too" etc.
I'm not saying mine is a great example, especially with the current state of the technology. If I had a fool proof example I'd be building it!
I think the thing they offer is the potential for great efficiency and thus lower cost and also a lower barrier to entry for systems that require trust.
What I'm most optimistic about is the next phase - how can we scale this and then what can we build on top to further practical use? That's a more interesting discussion than dismissing it all together.
Bitcoin introduced the blockchain and some good ideas about how it could be used. Ethereum ran with some of those ideas. There's even more ideas on how this can expanded we'll maybe see in a few years.
Would you be so kind as to show a few of those technologies in some practical use where they're sufficiently better than existing technologies that they are displacing existing businesses?
> But I just don't see how anybody can think that these are uninteresting times for this tech.
Really? For me it's the almost-a-decade of hype but seeing very little in practical utility beyond speculation, ransomware, and some light crime. As an example a New York Times writer just tried to spend the weekend living on Bitcoin and failed egregiously: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/nyregion/new-york-today-l...
I'm happy to admit that there's more activity in the space than I could possibly keep track of, so there could definitely be a pony in there somewhere. [1] But it shouldn't be any surprise that after so much hype resulting in no apparent useful effect on the rest of the world many people are skeptical that the cryptocurrency world will ever produce anything more than dubious claims, Ponzi schemes, and million-dollar thefts.
A great deal of the discussion here is surprisingly not smart because it's presuming that the current technical landscape is the forever technical landscape (i.e. mostly a presumption that looks like "Crypto, the entity, is just like BTC is today".).
I find it very strange because I feel like we've been able to do project out to "better working technology" quite well in the past. Supply and demand, y'all. Will at least some people have a use case for crypto? Yes. Can we use the example of bitcoin and other crypto's to relatively safely assume that in the future, there will be a cryptocurrency that more-or-less does what it says on the tin? I think it's silly not to.
START from that point in your discussions, because it's probably coming.
The reason I'm hyped about crypto (which in this article seems to be incorrectly equated to "web3") is because of the new possibilities it brings. The reason I put my money into stupid shit in crypto is because I don't know if it will work or not, but I'm excited to know if it will. Some of it does, most doesn't. I learn, progress has been made.
Imagine a whole new continent is discovered, and all the people back home are criticizing those who go there because it's not particularly safe at the moment, and look how warm and cozy they could be back in civilization.
No one's asking you to go to web3, stay here if you like. Hell, I found out today there's still people using gopher. There's room for all of us.
// currently it feels like the same hype as crypto
I keep seeing this take and it doesn't make any sense to me. Some tech has obvious utility and some doesn't.
For example, I knew internet (web, email) were valuable when I discovered them because accessing information and communicating with people were already things I did - the internet unequivocally made them faster and easier and often cheaper.
chatGPT / bard gave me a similar vibe - I use them to brain storm/shape ideas, and as mentioned elsewhere, they do a great job of tasks like drafting a job ad. These are things people already do and this tech just makes it better. So people will use it.
In contrast, I "get" why people were excited by crypto but I don't personally know anyone whose payment/banking experience is improved by it. As an American for example there was nothing tangible Bitcoin made easier vs my bank account and visa. So it was always less "obvious" that it was going to be a valuable thing beyond hype.
People said similar things with: AI, torrents, VR/AR, quantum computers, memristors, drones, chatbots, distributed social media, Internet of things, self-driving cars, robots, dapps.
Some of these technologies managed to produced something useful. On the other hand, I cannot use crypto to anything but speculation.
I do find the technical underpinnings of crypto (I refuse to ever use "web3") fascinating and I'm sure there are some valid applications. But everything I see right now is empty hype and usually just an open invitation to land grab in the promise of future profit. The spirit couldn't feel any more different than the original web.
Oh yes, but that's a much different question and is strongly conditioned by where Bitcoin and cryptocurrency are in the hype cycle (I'm using that term empirically, not normatively). You'll find at least that much negativity about other technologies and startups that have gotten to similar stages of (let's call it) ultrasuccess. Just look at the threads on Airbnb or Uber, for example. They're so vitriolic and repetitive that thoughtful discussion is almost impossible. We can speculate about the reasons for this but it definitely doesn't have to do with sentiment against new tech; it's a later-stage phenomenon.
Sure, but what I find odd is how crypto gets a large amount of techno-pessimism (among folks like us) that most other "new tech" doesn't? Like most often, when there's a proof of concept that doesn't work exactly right, right now, it pretty much never ends with "oh, well, guess that means it's broken forever and it will never work," which appears to be a prevailing sentiment around crypto.
I feel like I've heard this argument a lot over the last decade or so: it's early days, the valuable stuff is yet to come.
I've gone through about three phases of opinions on crypto:
1. "Blockchain is an interesting primitive that you could probably build something neat (besides a cryptocurrency) out of! I can't think of anything good off the top of my head, but I look forward to seeing what valuable thing people come up with."
2. Smart Contracts are an interesting primitive that you could probably build something neat (besides rebuilding existing finance tools without regulation) out of! I can't think of anything good off the top of my head, but I look forward to seeing what valuable thing people come up with.
3. NFTs are an interesting primitive that you could probably build something neat (besides speculative digital assets) out of! I can't think of anything good off the top of my head, but I look forward to seeing what valuable thing people come up with.
In each case, the tech looks like a neat idea, but I continue to wait for the actually valuable use-case to emerge. At this point, I'm starting to just pattern-match all crypto to "unlikely to provide real value ever."
That's ultimately why I'm turned off by crypto. I love some of the ideas, from a technical perspective. I do think some aspect of it is going to survive and provide immense value in the future, though I don't know what it will look like.
But right now, you have people, mostly younger, thinking they know how to build a better world by starting over from scratch. In programming, we've all seen (and been) the engineer who sees an old codebase for the first time and thinks they could do a better job with a full rewrite. We know that rarely works. And yet somehow many of those same engineers think they can do the same with a global financial system that's been in existence for centuries.
I know. I mentioned that crypto is a disappointment technologically. But it doesn't change the fact that it still brought massive profits and significantly impacted society. For worse but still... The point is with this much momentum behind a single tech, it will surge forward regardless of whether it has true merits that can live up to its hype or not.
I am left puzzled by the strong skepticism and even downright hostility I often see. I don't think any current cryptocurrency will take over the world and replace existing financial systems like fanboys argue, but they are trying out highly desirable features in real-world environment. I am certain many of them will eventually become widely adopted.
Even the basic requirement of all transactions being digitally signed is a huge step forward, especially when paired with hardware wallets[1]. It's crazy that we're still typing plain-text credit card numbers into inherently insecure computers, hoping that we'll be charged the correct amount (I recently wasn't), and that no keylogger or sketchy merchant steals or accidentally leaks the information.
Sure, dealing with digital keys and long hex addresses is clunky like sending email in 1984[2], but I feel there's a lot of real innovation thrown out with the bathwater when the whole sphere is called pointless Ponzi and so on, which is particularly odd to see in a forum dedicated to startup culture.
I am really impressed with it as a technology. It's absolutely brilliant.
But when I put on my business hat, I'm still not seeing it. For quite a number of years I've been asking for proof of daily use among significant market segments. For just as many years, I've been getting, "OMG THINK OF THE FUTURE!!!" as an answer.
I have some hope that we're at peak BTC hype, though. A lot of the enthusiasm (and the bigger scams) seem to have moved on to smart contracts, ICOs, etc. It's much harder now to ignore Bitcoin's years of not being very useful.
I largely agree. I think the field is exciting and interesting, and like many crypto fanatics say, there might be parallels with the early days of the internet.
I think part of the reason it takes time for people to see the potential is that a lot of it just isn't ready for mainstream yet. The tooling is not uniform and easy, PoW really does not seem like the way to go, and scalability is largely missing. It seems many of these issues are getting solved now though!
There are other issues that still stop me from investing in this (though I would invest more time if I had). One is that I don't have a model for where this is going - I'm not sure that the most popular systems make most sense from a technical point of view. Bitcoin seems to lose out to Nano, for example, and I'm not sure why Ethereum would be better than Cardano. It could be that these technologies are just paving the way for something much cleaner down the road.
Another thing is that consistently the economics don't make sense to me, and I feel like a lot of the conversation about cryptocurrencies is sort of pseudo-economics. It doesn't make sense to me how highly Ether is valued (IMO its value should be the value of a transaction). And the idea of limited supply doesn't make sense to me in the form it is in now - I think a currency should roughly scale with the productive output that it represents, with at most mild inflation or deflation. Limited supplies of current coins only seem to serve early adopters.
I can totally imagine the existing banking system (which, I think, has a much better understanding of economics than the crypto community) adopting a lot of the tech that was developed here and fiat currencies ending up reformed rather than the world switching to community-run cryptocurrencies to a significant extent. (I would feel much more comfortable moving my money to a central bank blockchain than to Bitcoin or Ethereum.)
Most of HN seems to hate crypto. My answer is still blockchain, but without the currency. I only recently (~1-2 years ago) got into Ethereum development and it turned my view of the digital world around. It showed me what the internet with a completely different monetization layer and without central entities like AWS or Google can look like.
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and speculation is the most obvious use case right now, and I don't think that will change over the next 1-2 years. But I'm convinced that many more will follow.
I was just a little bit too young when the dot com boom happened, mostly playing games and hanging out in IRC channels during those times. I always imagine how cool it would've been if I had been a capable developer back then. The blockchain ecosystem(s) are the first technology in the last 10-20 years that feel the same - it's incredibly early with people hacking away trying to build basic things using a completely different model of the world.
I didn't "get it" for the longest time, ignoring cryptocurrencies for many years. But once I "got it" it completely changed my way of thinking. I don't know about the timeline, but I'm more convinced than ever that it's the next big thing and that the centralized internet as we know it will no longer exist in a few decades.
For the record, I hold neither BTC nor ETH (besides what I use for development) and I didn't get rich from it.
I come from the other side of the argument: since there's so much money poured into cryptocurrencies, so many talents spending their days working on it, huge companies like Goldman Sachs saying that it's the future then what's taking so long?
I'm not even asking for a killer app at this point, just for a compelling argument of what the future of a blockchain-powered world will look like. I don't think I'm a "know-it-all" just for asking for a tangible explanation which doesn't revolve around a bunch of hand-waving or technically, socially and economically ridiculous statements such as "imagine Facebook but it's the blockchain".
Blockchain is not the magic device people make out to be, it's a cool hack but so far its practical use cases are rather limited. And if you think I'm a know-it-all for saying that I'm sure that you'll easily be able to shame me for the fraud that I am by pointing out the multiple problems that can be solved by the Blockchain more efficiently than with good old technology. So far all I have is "buying illegal stuff online" and "selling illegal stuff online". For everything else there's PostgreSQL.
People compare blockchain and cryptocurrencies to the internet or cell phones but I think it's completely disingenuous. While I'm sure you could find plenty of naysayers back then who failed to understand the scope of what the internet would become and how revolutionary it was at the very least easy to see what it brought to the table. You could communicate with anybody around the world, play games, maybe even buy stuff. You can argue about how important and valuable that is, but at least the potential is clear.
When you read these Blockchain pamphlets it feels like they're trying to convert them to their religion or political movement. It's about user experiences and decentralization and building blocks of trust. It's about the power of software and the encoding of human thought. And VR and AR for some reason.
You seem to be argiing from the position of "previous skepticism of new technologies was proved false, so we should assume this skepticism will prove false too" That doesn't seem reasonable. Some skepticism has been proven accurate. There's enough enthusiasm for crypto blockchain to carry it forward if there's a future in it. We don't all need to back that vision when plenty of valid criticisms exist for the skeptical viewpoint as well.
Sometimes inventions improve continuously over time, but sometimes they stop improving and stagnate. You can't just assume away criticism of technology with the assertion that things will improve in the future.
I think what a lot of cryptocurrency bears see is that blockchain-based currencies, especially BTC, have fundamental problems. Blockchains are fundamentally not scalable; since the more throughput a blockchain has, the harder it is to run a node, since every node processes every transaction. Another current problem is the massive energy usage of PoW blockchains. Concerning is that the biggest cryptocurrency by market cap seems to have no plans to research fixes to these problems, let alone implement them, and there is widespread opposition to change in general. Also, my personal experience is that 9 out 10 cryptocurrency projects lack clear technical explanations of how they work, with all the details. These problems coupled with the fact the industry is filled with hucksters, pumpers, and scammers makes people have a rather dim view of cryptocurrencies.
Perhaps these problems can be overcome (ETH is trying) but perhaps they can't, and if they can't then cryptocurrencies will be little more than what they are now (to a large extent), which is objects to fuel speculation.
And to be clear on my personal opinions, I wouldn't classify myself as a cryptocurrency naysayer, but enthusiasm is tempered and I believe that the current market caps are driven by speculation.
People ask this over and over, and rather than "you could do x, y, and z" what I always seem to hear are vague emotional appeals - "the possibilities are limitless", "we didn't understand the future of the internet / the smartphone / Facebook / The Beatles / Jesus when they started either", "it's not for everyone but if you're selling cocaine in Venezuela it's indispensible", "well currency/tech X is horrible too" etc.
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