Comment by m_ke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by m_ke | Hacker News Reader

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Because it's a ponzi scheme that will probably end up getting to the "too big to fail" stage before the music stops. All of these new blockchain schemes like ICOs, NFTs and web3 are just a way to recruit new segments of the population into the crypto universe in order to pump up the value of crypto currencies.

I have friends who are artists and musicians who completely drank the koolaid and are convinced that NFTs and web3 will liberate them from poverty. They will repeat all of the talking points about blockchains but have no idea what a database is. I ask them to show me a web3 website and they can't name one, show me someone they know who buys NFTs and they can't name any.

Here are some recent quotes from one of my friends:

"crypto is fairly new it’s quantum mechanics as well."

"NFTs make you a shareholder"

"yeah the Internet didn’t exist until people applied concepts to it as well. blockchain is a system where new concepts can exist on the Internet. "

"the meta data you're able to embed can be anything now so creators can make any type of art. whereas before it was just mp3 or MP4 but now u can monetize any type of digital content"

"You can protect your music or visual via an NFT and control the royalty split "

"Having the ability to retain royalties to creators is a feature we’ve never had we can sell links to exclusive bonus content, recipes, any idea whereas u post it on reg social media and it’s unprotected w no protection "

as someone who is a healthy skeptic of blockchain/crypto -- my theory is a bit more on the optimistic side. the hype/cultists that exist are kind of good for the community and is just a natural consequence of tech being released straight to the public instead of being consumed in the B2B technical world. there are plenty of people who understand it much better than "crypto is fairly new it’s quantum mechanics as well," and you just need to follow them instead of listening to the people that are in the "hype" layer of the tech. follow the developers and the scientists and you'll get a much better perception of what the future might hold.

and the ponzi scheme argument is very tired. there are far better arguments against crypto at this point if youre going to be on the anti train.

I don't know any serious developers nor scientists who have are bullish on crypto. Only developers I know who are into it spend most of their time hyping up their next rug pulls.

your entire argument falls on "i dont know anybody therefore it must be wrong"

I know plenty of people, including friends who got filthy rich on crypto, but I still haven't seen a single interesting use case of crypto that's not mindless speculation.

You have an easy way to win the argument, a simple proof by example will be enough to prove me wrong. So please list the amazing scientific breakthroughs or concrete examples of web3 tools that my mother could use.

well for one, i am also a skeptic. i just like to be proven wrong by foundational cracks and there are plenty of extremely smart people in the space. i'm certainly not arguing with you around blockchains being a useful tool today. however, i have an imagination and can foresee some usecases where the blockchain would truly change some of the way we do things. will it free us from our so called "shackles?" that a lot of the hypers like to say? probably not. or maybe? who knows. i'll tell you one thing -- there are many successful people investing in the space and generally, success follows success, so i'm optimistic from that viewpoint alone.

my main argument with your arguments is that close mindedness and flippancy doesn't get us anywhere.

> however, i have an imagination and can foresee some usecases where the blockchain would truly change some of the way we do things.

OK, what are they?

My brother is really big into crypto, and convinced my dad to get $1k in ETH. Over thanksgiving, they were hanging out talking about crypto, and my dad said he wanted to mess around with swapping tokens around and layer 2's but didn't want to touch his principal. So he opened AAVE, deposited his ETH, and got a loan in about 5 minutes flat. I thought that was pretty cool? I've never taken a loan for anything but student loans but I imagine it would be infinitely more difficult and time consuming to get a small personal loan like that from a bank.

I definitely agree that a TON of the crypto space is super scammy, and think it's an absolute shame, I don't blame anyone for being scared off.

It's not very convincing if you don't have any experience with actually getting loans. A quick google showed me plenty of fast loan providers.

It's not? I feel it would be disingenuous to imply that traditional 'fast' loan providers can match the speed/ease of getting a loan in 5 minutes, sitting on your couch, on thanksgiving day, with the funds instantly being available and requiring no documentation, forms, or manual approval. I mean if I'm wrong feel free to show me, I might just be ignorant.

Affirm? https://www.affirm.com/

Arweave, for one, uses blockchain for a novel approach to data storage.

It's not novel. It's IPFS with all the problems of IPFS made a magnitude worse by financial incentives.

Looking at this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Arweave/comments/gu5elw/arweave_per...

The advantage it has over IPFS is guaranteed permanence and the incentivization is core to that functionality.

Yeah, there are hundreds of thousands of "serious" developers working in the cryptocurrency space. I'm working in the space. No, my employer doesn't have a tokenized project. I'm not even working directly with web3, though I use it.

Many of us have a practical attitude which is effectively that the technology has massive potential, and at the same time, that it's probably overvalued for the current state of technology.

Of course, overvalued is subjective. It could all still amount to nothing, but it could also replace tons of legacy/traditional infrastructure and systems, and/or create a new global financial layer based on currencies whose supplies can't be manipulated by governments. The valuation is of course massively coupled to the perceived potential and the varying levels of conviction speculators have in it, which incentivizes a lot of disingenuous behaviours.

I'm not questioning that there are great engineers working on crypto, there are amazing engineers working on ad tech and high frequency trading too. Just like those examples I'd assume it's mostly because it's an interesting engineering problem and there's a ton of money to be made.

The only exciting potential use case of crypto that I've seen so far are DAOs, but I'm not convinced that there's any reason why they need to be on a blockchain instead of postgres or sqlite.

> All of these new blockchain schemes like ICOs, NFTs and web3 are just a way to recruit new segments of the population into the crypto universe in order to pump up the value of crypto currencies.

Mostly it is Ethereum which is the prime enabler of all of the things you listed above. ICOs, Tokens, DAOs, NFTs, Web3 and expensive gas fees. All of it.

Every, single feature it has introduced has created tons of scams in the crypto universe with the users who are new to this are none the wiser.

This is why we need a crash to get rid of the crypto hype-squads and focus on actually useful blockchain projects that are fast, scalable, cheap, affordable and are regulated which make it harder to create such scams that Ethereum consistently enables.

Cryptocurrencies that do not fit in future regulations will simply not survive. Especially the meme-coins.

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