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Comment by iskander | Hacker News Reader

>I totally agree that protocols like Aave, Curve and some others are extremely cool and useful technology, however, I've come to the preliminary conclusion that the degenerate disgrace that makes up 99% of the space now is permanently and irreversibly damaging reputation to a point where this technology might be ignored despite being useful and solid.

It's interesting because I've come to the opposite conclusion from very similar experiences. I think the regulatory and legal enforcement haze allows the infinite scams to multiply but I found it refreshing/surprising to find there is a serious and useful core technology that all the scams are imitating in style (but not substance)

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> It's interesting because I've come to the opposite conclusion from very similar experiences. I think the regulatory and legal enforcement haze allows the infinite scams to multiply but I found it refreshing/surprising to find there is a serious and useful core technology that all the scams are imitating in style (but not substance)

Well, why wouldn't there be? Cryptocurrency didn't start out the way it's being used now, and evangelists and nerds have been hard at work for over a decade in furthering the technology.

I can understand your perspective too, however, while we obviously appreciate and care for the underlying technology, almost no one else will. Most people have problems operating Metamask already, so there's no possible reality in which I can see cryptocurrency succeeding because of some awesome underlying technology that almost no one really understands. If cryptocurrency ever succeeds, it's because regulation has cracked down extremely hard, a lot of people are in jail, a lot of time has passed, the sentiment has recovered and real utility is commonplace.

The point at which APY rates for farming/staking are equal or almost equal to traditional treasury basis points, and the decision between investing in stocks or crypto is taken on the basis of fundamentals and utility, will be the time cryptocurrency has grown up and put on big boy pants.

> and real utility is commonplace

I'm not trolling, but I really don't know what this real utility is. I've been extremely active in crypto for two years (as a user, not a trader) and I still don't know if there is any real utility, outside of gated access to communities and/or voting on DAO proposals. Whatever utility there is either very minor or refers to something in the future.

In two years, everything in crypto has largely been the same. Transactions on Metamask run the same way. Mobile experience is uniformly awful. Buying shitcoins is still using the same old crummy Uniswap interface. The only difference is that there are a bunch of new chains VCs can pump and dump on.

Most projects in crypto are deeply involved in navel gazing. All these bridge projects are a good example - they all hail it as "revolutionary" if you can transfer funds from Sol to ETH. Outside of crypto, people ask "but why?"

> Whatever utility there is either very minor or refers to something in the future.

That sums it up pretty nicely, at least for DeFi.

Layer 1 currencies do have utility as currency, albeit defined by adoption. I sometimes pay for my pizza in Bitcoin. Some banks use XRP as a SWIFT-style cross-border payment network.

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