I’ve been in the Ethereum ecosystem for over six years.
I’ve heard “there’s a lot of work being done on…” literally thousands of times. Yet outside of the crypto-sphere I’ve only met a handful of people who’s life would be impacted in the slightest if the entire thing disappeared.
Ethereum is eight years old and debates about use cases, etc aside I think even someone towards the middle of the debate can readily acknowledge progress, utility, value, and adoption has been incredibly slow.
Consider ENS - the last time I registered with ENS the process was just as confusing and convoluted as ever, only in this instance with gas fees I paid around $300 for the name. Oh, and the various transactions kept failing - leaving me wondering (per usual with crypto) if my funds went up in smoke, off to some scammer, etc.
Like so many times in crypto before I just assumed the funds were gone but like I said I DO follow this space and DO find it interesting so I consider burning crypto left and right a relatively cheap education/hobby. Plus I get to tell cool stories like this one on HN ;).
I can’t imagine how creaky, bug ridden, impossible to scale, nearly impossible for mortals to use, and inevitably completely overrun by scammers and frauds an Ethereum (or any crypto) based mail and messaging system would be. No. Just no.
With every day, week, month, and year that passes hearing “We’re building! People are working on XYZ!” when meanwhile the only thing people actually see is the latest headline for some crypto criminal, fraud, scam, collapse of last years “use case” (NFTs anyone?), etc.
I’m not saying it’s dead but I think it’s pretty safe to say the window for anything approaching mass adoption, credibility, and real utility has closed.
“Stop trying to make fetch happen! It’s not going to happen!”
100% agree. Been in crypto for 12 years. I’ve held this view for the last 7 years. So much delusion in the space. So much “technological orgasms” with no grounding in real world business dynamics and economics.
Precisely. I follow because there is some interesting technical work being done. There is a lot being built but even after tons of time, effort, and resources (at least 10s of billions of dollars) the only thing that ever comes out of this work is another incredibly dense and nearly impossible to use "technological orgasm" with an extremely thin use case utilized only by (seemingly) the team that built it and a minuscule circle of hardcore enthusiasts.
MetaMask is by far the most popular wallet used for all things Ethereum and Web3. They touted "30 million" MAUs[0] during the peak (3/22) of the last crypto craze/bubble. Let's put that in perspective - there are an estimated 5.3 billion people on the internet. 30 million MAUs represents 0.06% of worldwide internet users. Facebook (which has been in rapid decline) has at least 2.6 billion MAUs. One social media platform vs an entire ecosystem (MetaMask can easily be characterized as the official onramp to Web3). Literally a half of a half of one percent of the TAM (internet users).
Want a (somehow) even bleaker picture? According to DappRadar the top 10 most popular Dapps[0] COMBINED have a lifetime total of 888k wallets (all numbers rounded up) that have ever interacted with the Dapp in any capacity. That's 0.00167% of worldwide internet users and I'm sure the MAUs for these Dapps are even more pathetic. Additionally, it's widely known that wallet != user (many users use multiple wallets and addresses). Looking at these Dapps none of them have any utility other than "DeFi" (swapping tokens around), play to earn games, and straight up gambling. To look at it another way, an absolute best case (impossible) scenario for MAUs of these apps worldwide is roughly the equivalent of the entire population of a small US city. Have you heard of Lee's Summit, Missouri (to pick one)? Yeah me neither and the same could be said for these Dapps.
All of the building in the crypto ecosystem is by crypto zealots for crypto zealots which the MetaMask and Dapp numbers show is an absurdly tiny (so small you can barely wrap your head around it) population. Crypto (other than gambling on exchanges) is an extremely obscure fringe religion.
Things are being worked on but nothing changes, crypto is still just a speculative asset for people to try making big bucks quickly with, people use monero to buy drugs. Those are the two usecases, it doesn't matter how much people work on cool crypto things if the usecase stays the same.
I’ve heard “there’s a lot of work being done on…” literally thousands of times. Yet outside of the crypto-sphere I’ve only met a handful of people who’s life would be impacted in the slightest if the entire thing disappeared.
Ethereum is eight years old and debates about use cases, etc aside I think even someone towards the middle of the debate can readily acknowledge progress, utility, value, and adoption has been incredibly slow.
Consider ENS - the last time I registered with ENS the process was just as confusing and convoluted as ever, only in this instance with gas fees I paid around $300 for the name. Oh, and the various transactions kept failing - leaving me wondering (per usual with crypto) if my funds went up in smoke, off to some scammer, etc.
Like so many times in crypto before I just assumed the funds were gone but like I said I DO follow this space and DO find it interesting so I consider burning crypto left and right a relatively cheap education/hobby. Plus I get to tell cool stories like this one on HN ;).
I can’t imagine how creaky, bug ridden, impossible to scale, nearly impossible for mortals to use, and inevitably completely overrun by scammers and frauds an Ethereum (or any crypto) based mail and messaging system would be. No. Just no.
With every day, week, month, and year that passes hearing “We’re building! People are working on XYZ!” when meanwhile the only thing people actually see is the latest headline for some crypto criminal, fraud, scam, collapse of last years “use case” (NFTs anyone?), etc.
I’m not saying it’s dead but I think it’s pretty safe to say the window for anything approaching mass adoption, credibility, and real utility has closed.
“Stop trying to make fetch happen! It’s not going to happen!”