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Comment by willio58 | Hacker News Reader

Carbon emissions aside, crypto is not mostly over. Saying crypto is over right now is like saying the internet was over in 2001.

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People need to stop comparing crypto to the internet. By 2001, there were many many clear internet uses cases that benefit society. Crypto has not demonstrated that since its inception.

At a time when technology improves and moves at lightning paces, crypto still hasn't proven itself to be useful in society in 15 years. In fact, it's proven to be the opposite of useful - it drains talent and promotes scams and ponzis. I see crypto as a disease.

ARPANET started in the late 1960s. The internet was mostly crystallized as early as 1982 when TCP/IP was standardized[1]. AOL became common place in the late 1990s.

The Bitcoin network started in 2009. Ethereum, which allows multiple decentralized applications to run on a single chain, started in 2015. The Bitcoin Lightning Network which scales Bitcoin transactions with state channels started in 2019.

Uniswap and MakerDAO are pretty impressive use cases. Ethereum is becoming more efficient as rollups[2] are developed and released which will lead to use cases that we can’t predict yet.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet

2. https://ethereum.org/en/roadmap/scaling/

No use case? Isn't it extremely useful for money laundering, organized crime fund storage and other criminal uses where cash was previously used?

I work in the legal cannabis industry and the only legit use of crypto I know of is for transactions for otherwise cash-only dispensaries.

"use cases that benefit society".

I've also written extensively on HN on how the only use cases for crypto right now is money laundering, easily creating scams, ponzis, rug pulls, and unregistered securities. These use cases do not benefit society.

Only due to current underregulation. Once those regulations come, those use cases will be more expensive than alternatives also.

Crypto is life saving in countries with unstable currencies/bad governments

Yes, the Venezuelan venture into Bitcoin has been a massive success eh?

(Haha)

You're thinking of El Salvador, and a different use case (legal tender with government incentives), which has indeed been ridiculed as a failure. The parent was referring to ordinary people using cryptocurrency without official backing, such as in Venezuela, which has indeed been a success for its intended purpose.

If you're going to come in with a smug attitude, it's more important than usual to get your facts right. And not get Latin American countries mixed up.

I concur, smugness levels severely lowered from my side here :(

I do still think touting a payment system with the transaction cowt of BTC for poor people is a tad rididcolous, but it’s hard to make that point after my crash and burn mixup.

The internet was mostly over in 2001. Of all the parts we really only kept the web, and even that is just a shell for ads now.

Well, no. Bittorent is not web, and it is huge. IMs are not web, and they are ubiquitous. Same with internet phone and video communication, which is mostly not web, even though it can be adapted to running in a browser.

Multiplayer gaming is most.definitely not web, and it's quite popular.

None of the above is esoteric; it's used by tens of millions to billions of people.

Of course the browser has eaten a lot, but there are still large pockets if the internet where it's not really adequate.

What do you mean mostly over? It's used to run the entire planet these days...how is that over? What am I missing in your comment?

Has AWS heard this?

A particularly poignant example given that it's AWS and not AIS...

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