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Comment by thereticent | Hacker News Reader

Genuinely curious, not being combative...what very interesting things have happened in the crypto space lately?

Oh, I dunno about lately (though I did stumble upon https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/big-ideas-things-excite... )

But when I was in the crypto space in 2018, there was a lot of interesting things happening in the smart contract world (like proofs of concepts of issuing NFTs as a digital "deed" to a physical asset like a house).

I don't think any of those novel ideas went anywhere, but it was a fun time to be experimenting.

> like proofs of concepts of issuing NFTs as a digital "deed" to a physical asset like a house

which went absolutely nowhere

Yeah, like most startups. I'd argue that a majority of AI startups now will go nowhere as well. That's just how new technology goes. Lots of shiny objects, lots of hype, and maybe 1%, if that, goes on to become a foundation of society.

Jury is still out on if crypto will become a foundation for society (if anything, it would be foundational for something boring and invisible like banking). I wouldn't bet on a startup doing that, but that's the only viable thing I can foresee crypto being useful for. But it doesn't mean that other applications can't be interesting and useless!

Teaching tens of thousands of programmers how the financial system actually works was interesting, heh.

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