I mean, absolutely. But let's not pretend that the whole blockchain bubble is a "nerd" (in the tech sense) thing. It hasn't been since like 2014. It also isn't an "interest of some", the cryptocurrency people very much want to force this dystopia and snakeoil technology onto everyone. All so a few people can make a lot of money.
This is what it comes down to IMO. Anything cryptocurrency related is just surrounded by a cloud of shady characters and scammers, even though the tech is legit. You just can't trust anyone, nor their intentions. Living your life and working in a constant state of paranoia like that is awful.
> And as far as the gaming goes, I cannot see how playing games is more noble usage of gpu than crypto mining.
As usual the gaming crowd is utterly lacking in self-awareness.
"Hey, those crypto guys need to stop doing dumb things with GPUs so me and my friends can use that fancy hardware to waste hours of our lives pretending to be soldiers and race-car drivers on our computers in the basement"
Say what you will about the crypto crowd, at least they know people think they're ridiculous.
>but some people here can't talk objectively about crypto for some reason.
To the contrary: It's the crypto people who can't talk objectively about blockchains, because every single "invention" they come up with has some kind of money-making scheme attached to it. There's very little talk of blockchains without the crypto tokens attached, because a blockchain without that is just an ordinary boring old distributed database, and that isn't fun to them. Every time I try to talk about that among a group of crypto enthusiasts, I either get ignored or the conversation fizzles. Even you're doing the thing where you assume that someone must not want to talk about it because they missed out on the opportunity to make money. That whole mentality is toxic and illustrates the ponzi-like nature of the scheme; those who got in first can make a lot of money from cashing out early, everyone else will get stuck holding the bag.
> I’ve had to answer to a Weird Nerd when I was starting out in my field, it was the worst fucking experience of my life,
I wouldn't want to tar all people who might be perceived as Weird Nerd, based on one data point (which AFAIK might not even be due to them being a Weird Nerd).
Almost all of the too-many people I've seen burn others under their influence, I wouldn't have called any of them Weird Nerd, and none of them appeared to be geniuses.
Rather they tended to be at least somewhat successful as political operators, unlike how the article characterizes Weird Nerd. (Arrogant seemed to be the most common, then greedy, dishonest, and unprintable bad word.)
Someone might decide to call some of those FTX cryptocurrency scammers Weird Nerds, but you could also just call them overprivileged brats with consequently warped worldviews.
People in crypto are delusional that it can somehow save the world from itself, at least they believe this in the bear market, and of course as soon as the bull market comes they flip ideology and rotate into fiat.
The Cryptosphere is a sess pit, full of scammers wanting to get rich quick. They will pump money into NFT platforms, not because they care about "funding the arts", but because they want to jump on the next hype train so they can flip some meaningless and hideous procedurally generated art by some 14 year old kid who wrote a script.
> Nobody cared about the tech then, nobody really cares about the tech now.
Agreed, out of 1000 people who want to talk about crypto, maybe 1 is the cryptography PhD who is in it for the tech, and everyone else is trying to get rich before the whole thing pops.
> Do they really think the current financial system is great and their online bank account is perfect and nothing radical is worth trying?
Try, absolutely! New tech is fun tech!
The problem is it's not about the tech is it? Lets be honest. It's just people trying to milk it for cash right now. Once they've all got theirs it'll evolve into something useful or just sorta be there now like Bitcoin
Web3 tech right now is people promoting profile pictures of bored apes, pirates, robots and (new to me) snowflakes with varying accessories on Twitter from my perspective. It's like a ridiculously expensive version of Pokemon except you can't even fight them against each other. It's a bit of a joke currently, I hope someone finds a decent use case
> Disclaimer: I write cryptocurrency systems, have been involved with it since way before Bitcoin, and have tried to help “normals” invest. It is simply not. going. to. happen.
What do you think the future of cryptocurrencies is if the vast majority of regular people won't invest in it?
> They don't have the background in math, in coding, in economics
And for those of us that do have backgrounds in every one of these fields, we notice the abuse of formal industry terms with crypto-exclusive definitions that weaken the economic structure or flat out fabricate fantasy.
Cryptocurrencies are a great idea for a more mature civilization. We are not that civilization.
> Practically everyone I knew who had something to say about Cryptocurrency would have the same basic points— giving power back to the people, providing an alternative to the traditional (read: banks/finance industry) methods, hedge against inflation, hedge against government overreach, etc.
Personally, I've been pointing out that it's all at best pointless and wasteful and at worst a scam since around 2011 (I started watching around the time the Trendon Shavers Ponzi scheme got going).
This was definitely a minority position in places like this at the time. I suppose 11 years of failure to actually become useful have moved the needle of public opinion a bit.
> I don’t remember hardly anyone talking about this issue with nearly as much (seemingly blind) passion or negative attitude in, say, 2013-2020~
You may have been in a bubble. Even people who _liked_ bitcoin were concerned about this once ASIC mining got going in earnest (around 2014 I think?)
As someone who have been very anti-crypto for a long time, it wasn't always a complete scam.
The first wave of the crypto boom, before anyone that wasn't a programmer had even heard of it, there was a lot of real work being done that very much mirrors current AI work. Lot's of very sharp developers learning about block chain, figuring out how to implement things, experimenting with ideas. Back then everyone owned their own wallet and you would meet at coffee shops to exchange cash for BTC.
Most of the serious engineers that were really into crypto during the first crypto boom of 2012 left in disgust when the second boom came around.
Having worked in AI/ML for a long time, I myself can start to see how they felt. We do have some really cool technology in front of us, I think it has a lot of potential, but so many of the loudest voices in this space are entirely out of touch with what's possible, and far more interested in hype and making money than the underlying technology.
>Every time I dig into crypto I find things that seem stupid, or useless, or actively bad. But so many people are into it!
During my time in tech I've only knew two people who held crypto. However, I've know a lot of people(myself included) who got into crypto, got dissilusioned by the promises, and after seeing that nothing they promissed actually arrived left.
5 Years ago I've heard how crypto is going to be a killer usecase for e-commerse, banking, and even cloud computing but no actual work was ever done to acomplish these goals
>The frustrating bit is that these scams paint a really sour picture of the space as a whole. There's a lot of value to cryptocurrencies, and as a technology it's poised to change the world in some very serious ways.
This gets repeated ad nauseam. Maybe it might be time to consider that this tidal wave of scams IS the way the technology is changing the world?
> the crypto tech cycle was one of the stupidest things
Same was said for the user-generated content that lived in the community forums on the fringes of the web back in 2000s. Big sites and 6-figure columnists even suggested that these were 'littering' the Internet.
15 years later, content is user-generated, and now there is even something that is called the 'creator economy'. And even those 6-figure, out-of-touch elite columnists who derided it are jumping on the bandwagon.
...
Crypto is a technology. It does things. We observe that it is able to do things and it works. Its just missing a widescale use-case. The moment someone finds that use-case, it will explode like how the actual web exploded back then. Solely the DAO concept is revolutionary by itself, enabling large-scale, democratic economic organization for the masses, which was not possible or difficult and totally non-transparent before. That a few people here and there used it for dumb reasons or failed in accomplishing various objectives like buying the constitution etc does not change what potential DAOs provide.
Of course, there is also the problem of crypto space and all the features and applications within them being WAY too out of the average user's league in terms of user friendliness. Just like how it required knowing what a 'forum' was, knowing how to 'register', and then even knowing the right people who could refer you to the forum so that the administration would approve your membership back in early 2000s.
> I'm pretty sure it's nothing but a pyramid scheme, but I always gave the enthusiasts the benefit of the doubt.
So go find out? I’m quoting you here for the “pretty sure” part. Do a deep dive. I’be done deep dives on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Monero, Nano, Iota, Hyperledger, BSC, Uniswap, Tether, Chainlink and cursory glances at dozens of other coins/tokens.
I’m a tech guy. I work on an operating system/embedded systems. Nothing about blockchains, DLTs, crypto, at its core is a scam to me. The author saying the “silent majority tech people” know its a scam is such nonsense to my experience. Every tech person I know thinks either A) its neat/super cool, or B) they don’t know anything about it besides memes.
Sure there are tons of misinformation, scams, and bullshit going on. That’s everywhere and is not special to crypto.
> cryptocurrency stuff is the closest I've ever felt today to the spirit of the old internet
Cryptocurrency feels like the exact opposite of the old internet to me - it feels like a bunch of anonymous bros looking for the next sucker to scam out of money and get rich quick.
I mean, absolutely. But let's not pretend that the whole blockchain bubble is a "nerd" (in the tech sense) thing. It hasn't been since like 2014. It also isn't an "interest of some", the cryptocurrency people very much want to force this dystopia and snakeoil technology onto everyone. All so a few people can make a lot of money.
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