Waaay back, I thought Bitcoin was a cool technology, and convinced some friends of mine with businesses to accept it. We had a lot of fun with it - it was really cool to pay for your beer by scanning a QR code and seeing the transaction come through this public, distributed, tamper proof ledger, like magic, with no need for money, banks or any of the other financial infrastructure we're used to.
Sadly, the "crypto space" was quickly invaded by hordes of people who never really cared about the technology itself, how it works and what it's actually useful for. (and what it's not useful for)
These people, who know nothing about it, and for years had dismissed it as a joke, suddenly began to talk about it very seriously as a very serious "investment" in self-proclaimed "expert" capacity.
You know the type of person I'm talking about! We've all seen them, and most of us can probably count one or two amongst our friends.
The potential for cool applications of blockchains is still there, but so far it seems to me cryptocurrency has mostly just been abused as a vehicle for crazy, baseless manias, and little to no meaningful application.
Largely crypto seems to fail at being distributed internet money. If a project is fast and cheap enough for it that correlates with being too niche to be viable.
We have seen BTC and ETH lose their function as internet money as transactions and prices have gone up.
Bitcoin being a crypto asset (I know everyone will want to dig in on that moved goal post, but it doesn't matter) is still extremely valuable and a massive step towards its intended goal. As a settlement layer, which is by now clearly what it should be, it is very good, and layer-2 and centralized layer-3 solutions if and when adopted will bring it the rest of the way.
There is so much meta talk about crypto on the internet, but no one has the chops to actually talk about the ups and downs, challenges and successes of something like the lightning network, which is perhaps one of the most important developments in the space despite not being a speculative vehicle.
> Largely crypto seems to fail at being distributed internet money. If a project is fast and cheap enough for it that correlates with being too niche to be viable.
So is that why other 'crypto' like XRP, Stellar, USDC and Algorand are also compliant for the ISO 20022 standard since they are useful at being 'distributed internet money'? [0]
> We have seen BTC and ETH lose their function as internet money as transactions and prices have gone up.
Both of them have completely failed in their original purposes.
Then you did not look (closely) enough at BTC. When transaction prices went up in 2017 [1] the second layer technology "Lightning" was invented and build-out.
Right now, Joe Average, can transact for fractions of pennies. [2]
Haven't you realised that 'the second layer technology "Lightning"' aka Lightning Network is not Bitcoin and is an off-chain system and is centralised by design which contradicts and defeats the whole purpose of what Bitcoin was built for? [0]
The Lightning Network is decentralised because it is trustless and permissionless. Anyone can send Bitcoins instantly and almost for free. Check out the code to convince yourself.
"Can" is doing a lot of work here. I finally got around to playing with Lightning recently, my sense was it's quite a ways away from being ready unless you've got a decent amount of frequent income + spending going through btc. The worst part is it seems poisoned by nodes that want to extract a %-amount fee rather than a flat or bytes-dependent fee. It was actually one US penny more expensive to send a ~$50 lightning transaction via ACINQ (a recommended node that would actually accept opening up a channel) than just sending a normal blockchain transaction, where recently you can pay the minimum 1 sat/byte and get confirmed in not too long.
Lightning has promise but the regular chain is still just fine for many use cases especially for normal people, barring those rare periods of exceptionally high transaction fees. A transaction will typically show up in the mempool "instantly" and for many vendors that's good enough; much like the classic written checks system they can trust the purchaser isn't going to try any funny business before the transaction is fully confirmed/settled and you can let them go on their way with their groceries or coffee or whatever. If they do try something (successfully), well, you're out a small amount (maybe, an intermediary like bitpay may tank those for you), and you ban them from your business. For many other types of transactions, even waiting for at least one transaction but not expecting that for 24 hours from now is fine and impacts nothing. My hope is the effective minimum of 1 sat/byte will be decreased because right now it's 9 cents to send the median sized 224 byte transaction and if btc doubles again to $80k USD then the minimum fee doubles to 18 cents without anything changing, that's like an extra pack of ramen. Well it's still not that bad, especially since it's not amount-dependent; my whole state recently mandated grocery stores start charging 8 cents per plastic bag when they used to be free, many people are just personally tanking it and still throwing them out, but everyone would rather pay no fees if they could.
Unfortunately at the the surface, it’s all cranks. The people you see trending on Twitter and such almost seem like an alien species. And then there’s all the advertising for exchanges and such being blatant “get in at the bottom of the pyramid scheme” nonsense.
I was also “into” crypto roughly early, never found a community (nor should I have to), that’s all I see, and that’s all I therefore assume exists.
I had a fantastic experience at DevCon V. Ethereum developer conferences attract all the technical folks and almost none of "money" people.
I haven't gone to any Bitcoin conference, but I can't see it being the same. Bitcoin's aversion to change means mostly demagogues are left, and all the talk is money talk.
Bitcoin isn't averse to change, it's averse to changes that impede on its core attributes: decentalized, permissionless, global, censorship-resistance. Increasing the block size as a patch to keep fees down infringes on the core attributes, because you increase the minimum requirements for running a node.
There's a lot of innovation happening in and on Bitcoin. RSK for smart contracts, BetterHash for mining pool decentralization, the Lightning Network or Liquid Network as examples of layered scaling.
Bitcoin's dev meetups are great examples of the helpful, thoughtful, enterprising and conscientious community that exists, without the overly loud, overly shallow speculators.
> Bitcoin's aversion to change means mostly demagogues are left, and all the talk is money talk.
That's true, but you say it as if that's a bad thing. Bitcoin is valuable because it does not change, its proven to work, and people know that. If the downside is that there isn't as much to talk about at a conference, then I don't give a shit.
You’re right that Bitcoin is still the most valuable because it’s resistant to frivolous changes, however there’s far more development happening in the space today than ever before!
Here’s links to 3 full days of talks from the Open Source Stage at the Bitcoin 2022 conference:
> The potential for cool applications of blockchains is still there
It is important to note that crypto currencies are distributed blockchains, a subset of blockchain methods. Blockchains for tamper detection purposes have been around for longer than bitcoin and its ilk, IIRC they date back to the mid 80s or before.
I love Git. It is a distributed cryptographic chain technology. Git is open source and free and used by many millions of people every day. You would think that proponents of decentralized cryptographic chain technology would talk about Git a lot.
But the crypto people don't talk about Git. They are focused on being early adopters and investors in something that will generate 1000x returns, even if those returns come from a pyramid scheme mechanism.
I saw this happen with the early internet, and then later with crypto... It took a long time for the Internet to go from 1) only know to geeks to 2) grifters promising the world to 3) wider acceptance. Maybe this will happen too with crypto, but until it sorts out its grifter problem, it will be always be stuck at stage 2.
The amount of time the internet took to show it is a solution to real problems, as well as the time it took for the internet to 'grow up' beyond the grifter stage (which was about the same time, and probably that is not a coincidence) is far shorter. Already - and bitcoin/crypto shows no sign of growing beyond the grifter phase. What, something like 1/3 of everybody who bought Bieber's NFT thing got it grifted? That's insane.
No, people distinctly remember that when the first wave of hype about the web came along, the public was being encouraged to buy books on Amazon.com, other stuff on eBay.com browse masses of content on Yahoo and AOL and of course post lots of messages on the social media of the day. Most of this interaction was free to the user not an "investment", and it was recognisable as a slower and lower resolution version of most of what we had today by the middle of the first decade of the Web.
The Internet existed before then in various forms, but never as an industry of rich people trying to convince poorer people to invest all their savings in email.
You're getting downvoted for that, but you aren't wrong.
There aren't fewer grifters on the internet. There are just more regular people. And also more grifters, but they can hide in the rest of the noise.
It's going to be the same with cryptocurrency if it sticks around. There will always be people trying to trick less-wise people into giving up their money for nothing.
It's not about the tech. IMO a payment should just work. You don't need to understand the technology. It's foolish to expect people to know the tech in and out, it is irrelevant for 90% of people.
There's no need to have cool applications of blockchains, there's only need for decentralisation.
> mostly just been abused as a vehicle for crazy, baseless manias
The whole movement came out of monetary crank-ism, those people were always there.
Let me know when there’s a mainstream non-scam MiltonCoin or KeynesCoin that isn’t deflationary and automatically models semi-optimal central bank policy.
I assume by "Monetary crank-ism" you mean scepticism of the dominant economic playbooks. That is very different from investment bubbles which the parent is talking about.
You can call it crank-ism if you want, but the movement behind Bitcoin's properties were born out of very real concerns about current economic models and what their effects are.
The origin is the cypherpunk movement and coders looking into ways to exchange money peer-to-peer. If you think that's "crank-ism" I'm not sure I want to know what social and monetary policies you support. Certainly Bitcoin gained initial popularity fast because it enabled the people to take back some control.
> Let me know when there’s a mainstream non-scam MiltonCoin or KeynesCoin that isn’t deflationary and automatically models semi-optimal central bank policy.
Bitcoin continues to inflate until ~2140. The difference is that it inflates in a predictable curve and is not subject to the decisions of central bankers.
Inflationary policies also have a very tight link with speculation in the economy. You only need to look at the past 2 years.
Bitcoin supply does grow until 2140. It will inflate only if the backing economy and users does not grow until then. If this growth outpaces the supply of bitcoins, it deflates. And just every economist (and every piece of empirical data we have) will tell you deflation is about the worst thing that can happen to an economy, in terms of monetary events.
> it's going to be used as a speculation vehicle rather than money.
I see this claim time and time again, but it's hardly convincing. Deflationary assets don't exist in a vacuum, they compete with inflationary assets that create value over time (such as stocks), and it's not a binary decision as to which one is going to be the best investment/use of your money. Additionally, the value of pretty much anything (whether deflationary or inflationary) is hardly a factor of their availability in the future but rather their actual or perceived utility at a precise moment in time.
>Bitcoin is very effective environmental activism.
While using the per-design resource destroying, planet burning Proof-Of-Waste? Are you Kidding?
And no, deflation does not encourage more long term investments, it does simply encourage hoarding, not exactly a desirable thing, form any perspective. And of course it is the fatal (and likely never fixed) flaw in bitcoin-as-a-currency.
I find the GP's comment tenuous but I also find the environment-damaging rhetoric you and a sibling (and thousands of others) give on proof of work even more so. If you want to bite the bullet and say people shouldn't be able to pay for energy and do with it what they want, fine, but otherwise, price out the actual energy costs, and realize the purpose of such costs: security. Bank of America alone spends $1bn/yr on cybersecurity, bitcoin mining costs the world about ten times that. It's not that unreasonable. Another comparison is it's about 1/8th the US spending on cigarettes.
> Bitcoin being deflationary helps us move away from the mentality of a throw-away society.
No, it does not. How could it? It does nothing but encourage hoarding. Not only that, but also a economy where everything is more scare tomorrow than today, is a economy in perpetual decline.
>You can use the Lightning Network to use Bitcoin as a currency. It's almost instant and free.
That does not side step the proof-of-waste on the main chain. This is a completely unrelated debate.
No it doesn't. And you are moving goalposts. But still, it's a obvious and transparent lie. It wastes electricity that could have been put to good use, like power2(gas|ammonia|syngas|heat|cooling) or just normal, dispatchable consumption in a Wide area synchronous grid, a thing that exists pretty much everywhere where electricity generation is a thing.
And bitcoin does not use electricity, it just flat out wastes it. And that's not because bitcoin in itself is useless (it is), but due to the design of the Proof-of-Waste. Electricity use implies that electricity is converted into something. Every iPhone uses X Wh. If you dail up the usage, the output increases. It's not perfectly linear, but that's a reasonable approximation. Bitcoin is different: More electricity will never produce a better service, more bitcoins or whatever. Bitcoin will not ever get better by using more. And yet it is designed to waste a amount of electricity proportional to it's price. Oh, and it is only profitable to mine if you use a below-average electricity price. E.g. use the laxes regulations, the most polluting or the most illegal sources of electricity.
Unless this is sarcasm, do you wanna talk about the environmental ramifications of so much work being duplicated and dumped in the bitcoin network? Like, the sheer number of machines and waste heat that comes from nodes who weren't quite fast enough to get the payout, and just had to put all those calculations into /dev/null?
Bitcoin is very effective environmental activism. It makes renewables more profitable because it offers a base price for excess energy. Any place, 24/7.
I think some inflation is good as it is an incentive to invest in capital projects. If you only have deflation, why shouldn't you hoard your wealth? I mean, since it's always going to be worth more tomorrow than today. Inflation is a shadow that people use to excuse their greed
It seems you assume investment is generally good. As you can see right now people invest in anything just to save their cash from rising inflation, but the investments often aren't sensible to put it mildly. Valuations of many companies based on realistic forward P/E ranges are outright silly. Nor is investing necessarily beneficial for society in general. In fact many of these corporations are outright destructive, but capital gets allocated to where it can multiply the best, not where it might have a positive influence on society.
It's the fiscal policy of many countries that's massively driven up asset prices including cryptocurrencies. Those who didn't invest saw their savings printed away.
Inflation (of IOUs) is good for those holding the actual wealth (resources, land, farms, factories, real estate, etc - often through public shares). It's good for those who have debt denominated in inflationary currency. It's definitely good for some people and their business. What many people simply don't understand is they're not part of that group.
This is something I’ve thought about and while I agree that a deflationary currency would be detrimental to our constant economic growth, I wonder if that’s actually a bad thing.
Do we really want constant growth and pointless consumerism knowing what it is doing to our environment? Maybe a deflationary currency would be good, as people wouldn’t want to spend it on frivolous things and only use it to buy things they really need.
I don’t really know where I stand, but I have come to doubt my initial concerns over deflationary money and I wonder what others think about such a radical shift.
While this is the most thoughtful comment, it seems like without the effective equivalent of population caps, price controls, and a large redistribution network, a deflationary system would involve people fighting over progressively smaller pieces of the pie, while those who have more than enough continue to take a smaller amount of their resources over time until the effective expenditures of the wealthy are effectively zero. This also would effectively bar new entrants to the system, so children, those with little access to tech and energy resources, and those in developing counties.
> Sadly, the "crypto space" was quickly invaded by hordes of people who never really cared about the technology itself, how it works and what it's actually useful for.
If having a solid understanding of the tech underlying crypto is a prereq of any sort, it will never reach mass adoption. Personally idgaf what fiat we choose or tech underlying my debit transactions, so long as the value is reasonably stable, my account reasonably secure, and my form of payment is accepted by almost all merchants.
Unfortunately, the world tends to dish out black swan events that invalidate your assumptions of what is reasonable. Canadian truckers, Argentinian hyperinflation, Sri Lankan federal deficits, Turkish central banking mismanagement, Russian expansionist delusions... the list goes on and on.
Sure, the dollar is reasonably stable. The problem is that the global financial system is deeply flawed in its fundamental properties. Bitcoin is a hedge against inflation, financial meltdowns, geo-spatial catastrophy, and more.
This doesn't make sense. The vast majority of people aren't interested in the slightest about the technology. Nobody needs or wants to know the intricacies of SEPA payments, I just want to touch the terminal with my watch and boom, payment completed.
I actually do still use it to pay for a SAAS side project from a retired startup founder who got kicked off paypal. It's super convenient for digital stuff like that.
When do you think that happened? For me it was around 2012. Thats when I exited crypto and never looked back.
I actually built an app before that which would easily transfer money between countries, by finding matching local trades. Unfortunately to turn it into a service, it requires the currency to both be popular and stable.
If I replace crypto with "web", your comment still feels the same, yet the WWW is more popular than ever. Maybe look under the rug a bit deeper, but at the same time I'm not saying that the abuses aren't there.
> The potential for cool applications of blockchains is still there, but so far it seems to me cryptocurrency has mostly just been abused as a vehicle for crazy, baseless manias, and little to no meaningful application.
Check out DeFI on Ethereum and your hope will resurrect. aave.com, pooltogether.com, goodghosting.com, polymarket.com, ens.domains, gitcoin. https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/
Sadly, the "crypto space" was quickly invaded by hordes of people who never really cared about the technology itself, how it works and what it's actually useful for. (and what it's not useful for)
These people, who know nothing about it, and for years had dismissed it as a joke, suddenly began to talk about it very seriously as a very serious "investment" in self-proclaimed "expert" capacity.
You know the type of person I'm talking about! We've all seen them, and most of us can probably count one or two amongst our friends.
The potential for cool applications of blockchains is still there, but so far it seems to me cryptocurrency has mostly just been abused as a vehicle for crazy, baseless manias, and little to no meaningful application.