Why Crypto Can't Build Anything Long-Term | Hacker News Reader

Why Crypto Can't Build Anything Long-Term

x.com

14 pointssalkahfi11 comments

Crypto pretty much failed to deliver anything promising other than the original idea and its been reduced to pyramid schemes.

I say this as a builder who already had to pivot 4 times, the projects are either scams, gambling or killed by regulation.

Its not possible to have a legit ethical legal business in the ecosystem. Builders build then they realize the projects have no future and move on.

I get where you’re coming from. The space is rough, and a lot of what we see today really does look like speculation loops and noise. But I don’t think crypto failed. I think it’s still in the middle of figuring out its real gravity. Every major technological shift starts this way. The truth is that attention, liquidity & belief are still being shaped. the speculation is the infrastructure. The same mechanisms that look like gambling today are the same ones that will power the next generation of real financial and social systems once they mature. The hard part is staying long enough to see that transition happen.

Sounds like its a solution looking for a problem.

I like self-custody but thats about the most interesting use-case it delivers, everything else seems to revolve around zero-sum games.

Saying we are still early is a meme for the pyramid scheme.

Just like the 90s are more than a decade ago, and we all need to get to terms with that, so is the fact that crypto is not new. if it's still trying to find a valid use case, then that's a bad thing because cryptocurrencies are old tech

People typically pay when they desire something they can't obtain without your involvement, right?

The core issue with these companies may be that they're disconnected from users' actual needs, driven only by investors' and speculators' forecasts of what might eventually monetize.

But if they had built something people pay for, they wouldn't need to follow hype cycles, right? So maybe the problem—more than short cycles—could be companies not building something people actually need.

> But if they had built something people pay for,

If they had something legal that people would pay for in itself, why would they need cryptocurrency?

I think there are situations where crypto is better for legal purposes—for example, sending money via SWIFT can cost like $50, whereas using an efficient stablecoin is easier and cheaper. Another benefit is allowing agents to buy stuff in an easier and more affordable way. In general, another advantage is preventing bad governments from choking bank accounts for not legal political motivated attacks.

I feel like this doesn't really answer the "why," it just describes the situation. Almost everything said here could apply to anything in the VC-funded world; what makes the crypto space uniquely vulnerable to this cycle?

https://de.fi/rekt-database

Crypto has had a lot of fads. NFTs, GameFi, memecoins, airdrops... these had no fundamental demand so if you missed the fad you got nothing. There's durable demand for no-KYC leveraged trading and stablecoin issuing and that's about it.

I have been building a news website for almost 7 years now and this article gave me a level of anxiety that I should not be getting

Reply on news.ycombinator.com