That... seems like a huge negative to me. No wonder crypto enthusiasts give me the same feeling as relentless door-to-door salesmen.
- It turns practitioners into "relentless door-to-door salesmen" as you put it, fanatical commission-based salesmen, which makes any kind of rational discussion about pros and cons etc. impossible.
- It allows you to monetise without having anything to monetise, which has drawn in the scammers and fraudsters on an unprecedented scale.
- It offers no incentive to working solutions. All the ICOs failed because they got the money up front with no obligation to deliver anything, so even the small number that weren't out and out scams ended up effectively becoming scams. Spend any time in the space, and you'll realise the gap between what is promised and what is possible is often insurmountable, but the gap isn't important, because you just need to convince enough people that what you are trying to do is possible for long enough to get rich quickly.
- It offers no incentive to more efficient solutions. Why use existing fast, free and low energy money transfers, for example, when you can make slow, expensive money transfers that use up 5% of the world's electricity but make a handful of people rich in the process? There are very few cryptocurrencies which have genuine legitimate use cases, and the small number that arguably do are always worse in every way than what they replace, but they are still attractive and gain traction because they can get a small number of people rich quickly.
- It doesn't look like it'll go away. While putting use case before monetisation means something without a use case will wither away, with monetisation before use case it could go on burning up trillions more programming hours and countless other resources indefinitely without ever finding a genuine legitimate use case.
So crypto is doing the same for value/money. It's freeing it from the institutions (banks, governments, etc.) and allowing it to flow more freely and efficiently. This is why some people call it the internet of value/money. So, if you believe that freedom allows innovation to flourish, you should see this as a very powerful thing that could eventually be the backend of the entire financial system, just as TCP and other protocols are the backbone of the internet. It allows innovation to flourish at the edges, because we have stable monetary protocols that are open to anyone. A hacker in their basement can now build financial applications, or a group can coordinate in new ways through DAOs, or someone can just store value that isn't tied to any government.
> The network effects behind TCP/IP's and Linux's success are fairly clear and reduce ultimately to issues of trust and symmetry -- potential parties to a shared infrastructure can rationally trust it more if they can see how it works all the way down, and will prefer an infrastructure in which all parties have symmetrical rights to one in which a single party is in a privileged position to extract rents or exert control.
Sure you may be able to build a bespoke proprietary protocol on top of the open foundations of http or the bitcoin and etheream blockchains, but businesses will have an incentive to shop for more open systems if they are staking anything important on it.
http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/magic-cauldron/magic-cauldr...
Also, the page requires JS to render, so it's probably crap anyway.