People love shitting on NFTs, but there's still a really good art scene based on NFTs and smart contracts. And once you have digital objects that you actually care about, all the web3 infrastructure is surprisingly useful.
The actual currency and methods of payment changed over the years – if you go back long enough, you will notice we have used barter systems that exchanged goods and services for other goods and services.
OP needs to read some Graeber and stop perpetuating this myth.
> A second major argument of the book is that, contrary to standard accounts of the history of money, debt is probably the oldest means of trade, with cash and barter transactions being later developments.
Sure, bartering isn’t the oldest, but the book doesn’t seem to discount bartering entirely.
Yeah, but the article talks about barter in the sense of transacting with natural resources like gold and diamonds. Graeber's point is that these items (along with debt) were mainly used as tools of arranging social relationships. They weren't used for general purpose economic barter as we know it. That only came later, after states introduced coinage and fiat money.
The book does indeed discount barter almost entirely. In the context of human societies over millennia, it's a fringe practice at best. This is even mentioned in the wiki article.
I guess there are a few concerns here. What if the game developer goes out of business, or dies, or accidentally drops their db? What happens if they decide they don't like one of their collectors and want to wipe their balance clean? (Of course, you could do this with NFTs as well, but you'd have to write it into the contract ahead of time).
On top of that, the developer would need to build and operate their own infrastructure for trading with the tokens. If they were NFTs, then they just slot into existing applications without any extra work.
You can address all of those issues regarding continuity equally as well with actual legal contracts as you can with crypto 'smart' contracts (and you need the legal contracts in either case).
I'm all in on the grime, but I feel like this is one of the main reasons people are averse to the current crypto landscape: People generally prefer to live in shopping malls than the wild west.
>I feel like this is one of the main reasons people are averse to the current crypto landscape: People generally prefer to live in shopping malls than the wild west.
Somehow I think crypto having zero legitimate use case has more to do with it.
Really it sounds like the author is advocating for a new type of internet- one that requires sufficiently advanced technical knowledge to interact with, similar to back in the day.
You're building a straw man argument against the pro-crypto side though. Not everyone there is a crypto0libertarian anrarcho-capitalist.
There are a lot of people who are optimistic about the technology who also welcome regulation on the CEX side. I feel like most people in the pro-crypto camp also acknowledge that several of the ancillary components that make up the crypto ecosystem (such as wallet technology) are really problematic from a UX standpoint -- but also that they are fixable.
That said, the whole global-reserve currency thing might be les of a straw man, as it correctly describes the views of a lot of Bitcoin maxis (who are delusional IMO). But we're talking about a broad technology with other use cases, and isn't accurate for everyone.
Yet after 14 years they don't seem to ever actually get fixed - from just this week[0].
The fundamentals of crypto - irreversible, be your own bank, no margin of error, medieval castle level security practices/requirements, etc go against fundamental human nature. We forget things. We make mistakes. We're not capable of securing financial resources against an entire internet full of marauding bandits.
How many CC charges are disputed daily? How many password resets do you think Bank of America does daily? Answer is: staggering numbers. Post-FTX many "crypto users" (read: have an account on a CEX) actually interacted with blockchain for the first time and transferred crypto to a wallet. Ledger wallet sales exploded. It didn't take long for them to deal with such tremendous incoming of people losing access, forgetting seeds, etc to implement a backup mechanism. It didn't go well[1].
True, Bitcoin has been around for about 14 years, but we're only a couple years into the current wave of consumer hardware wallets. And from a smart contract standpoint we're still seeing innovative for different ways to control the flow of assets. I don't think that the future of blockchain transactions necessarily needs to involve consumers interacting with the technology on such a low level. It's seems like there's plenty of room to build abstractions on top of it... which I'm sure the purists wouldn't like. But ultimately, I'd give it a few years to see what happens before writing it off.
I don't dismiss it completely - for example, I have many friends who fled countries who would've been happy to be able to leave with something other than the clothes on their back. However, this is (fortunately) a very niche use case.
14 years is a very long time. I've been using Linux on the desktop since 1997. For probably 10 years there people were talking about it being "the year of the Linux desktop". 25 years later the Linux desktop has roughly 3% market share - it was extremely fringe in 1997 but it's still very fringe now.
No reasonable person thinks it will ever materialize (let's call that cracking double digits) at this point. If it weren't for the pumpers, shills, bag holders, etc driven by greed (often desperation) and direct financial incentive the unsuitability of crypto for the general population would be as widely and universally agreed upon by now.
The crypto ecosystem has also had the benefit of equating to "get rich quick" for many people along with investors, ICOs, etc pouring at least tens of billions of dollars into the ecosystem. Yet one look at a block explorer for any chain tells you very quickly that usage is abysmal.
If you look at the resources poured into the space and real on chain transaction data crypto likely has the highest user acquisition cost of all time.
I don't think it will ever die but if anything resembling widespread adoption hasn't happened by now it almost certainly isn't ever going to and this was my point: it's impossible to reach widespread adoption when the fundamental properties go against the most well established truths of humanity, society, and culture.
14 years in finance is tiny. The first modern corporations were formed in the 11th century. It took 500+ years to go from there to the British East India Company. It took a further 200 years to get the London and New York Stock Exchanges, another 100 years to get the American Exchange (formerly the "curb market", broker/dealers who had been kicked out of the NYSE), and then another 70 to get NASDAQ.
I don't think we'll see widespread adoption of crypto this generation. It may be very important by the time my kids are retired, though. There are going to be many, many speculative bubbles and panics in the meantime. It took 200 years to go from the British East India Company to the London Stock Exchange, but there were 3 financial panics (Kipper Und Wipper, Tulip Mania, and the General Crisis of 1640) in just the 22 years between 1618 and 1640.
Are you really comparing the rate of progress from hundreds of years ago to the 21st century?
For the entirety of the life of the cryptocurrency space we've had:
- The internet
- Smartphones
- Social media
- On, and on, and on...
Needless to say adoption rates for EVERYTHING (including finance) have accelerated by many orders of magnitude. I was around for the (brief) five year period on the web from 1993-1998 when people thought you were out of your mind doing any financial transactions on the internet. By 1998 grandmothers were listing knick-knacks on eBay.
If you want a more direct (recent and somewhat relevant) comparison from the world of finance look at credit cards. American Express launched the first "charge card" in 1958. The magnetic strip wasn't patented until 1960. But by 1970 51% of US families had at least one[0].
Credit card adoption rates within their first 12 years were also one-two orders of magnitude greater than crypto (after 14 years). In the 1960s!
People, broadly, take to things pretty quickly and easily as long as they actually have value, utility, and offer some improvement in their lives.
I really wish the crypto community could stop arguing, stop pumping, stop making excuses, study the (ample) data, and look inward to figure out why almost no one sees any value or utility in it. The first step to addressing an issue is acknowledging you have one.
Social changes take longer than technical changes, and social changes to how people collaborate with strangers and invest their livelihoods take much longer than changes to how they spend their leisure time. If you try out a website and don't like it, you've invested a couple minutes of your time and can back out without any major consequences. If you invest years of your life in a venture and then lose all the rewards of that because you forgot your seed phrase, well, you'll be a little more reticent to adopt that technology.
Crypto is fundamentally a technology that allows trade and collaboration between people who mutually distrust each other. If you trust the other person to settle up, just use a database or a credit card (it's right there in the word "credit"). It follows that early adoption is going to happen in areas where people mutually distrust each other and can't rely on traditional methods of dispute arbitration (i.e. the state and the legal system), either because they're doing something the state doesn't approve of, or the state is not viable where they are.
Most of HN does not fit into this demographic. We're usually in high-trust social groups (eg. white-collar work) in a high-trust nation (eg. the United States). So it'd be completely mysterious what use-case crypto would ever serve.
But the trend worldwide since 2009 has been generally lower levels of trust and weaker, more insecure, and more heavy-handed state institutions. In 50 years we may all look like Venezuela. A lot of people think "I'd rather be dead than live in a world where people don't trust each other", and they will probably get their wish. But for survivors, it's very useful to have a way to trade with people who probably don't have your best interests at heart.
Come to think of it, cryptocurrency is a fundamentally pessimistic technology, and perhaps the reason it inspires so much vitriol is that people don't like to think about negative things like the collapse of society happening.
> Social changes take longer than technical changes, and social changes to how people collaborate with strangers and invest their livelihoods take much longer than changes to how they spend their leisure time. If you try out a website and don't like it, you've invested a couple minutes of your time and can back out without any major consequences. If you invest years of your life in a venture and then lose all the rewards of that because you forgot your seed phrase, well, you'll be a little more reticent to adopt that technology.
Yet the web exploded in use and changed almost every aspect of society inside of a decade - connecting strangers around the world with no inherent trust mechanism. Look at my "grandma on eBay" for example. I remember the days of "Well, I'm going to send this person a money order. I hope I get my stuff". Or "ok, I'm putting my credit card number in this random webpage, let's see what happens..."
Lack of trust is not a new thing and for successful platforms and changes it hasn't slowed down adoption much.
I understand the rest of your position even less. In the event of the complete collapse of society your bitcoin (on the internet that no longer functions, depending on electricity that doesn't exist) is even less useful than paper money with a dead president on it. At least you can burn that for warmth, cooking, etc... When faced with using scare electricity for survival or mining to run the bitcoin network I assure you no one is going to waste extremely precious watts on that.
Speaking of situations no one wants to think about, in this scenario the only thing that will win and ensure survival is force - weapons. This is an area where the "preppers" hoarding ammunition are somehow more rational and logical than the crypto community - and that's really saying something.
If you are even entertaining such a scenario a couple of thousands of dollars for guns and ammunition is an infinitely better investment than crypto.
Unfortunately yes but compared to the bombastic (delusional) positions and claims of many crypto enthusiasts with crypto replacing virtually every technology platform, currency, and complete worldwide domination displaced people are (fortunately) a tiny "total addressable market" (yes, I sicken myself calling it that but I don't have a better term ATM).
I like how none of the commenters here actually read the article, and they're all talking about literally surviving a car crash -- not how to emotionally survive the aftermath of one.
I read it. The most I can do about this is drive safely. The perspective of the aftermath is interesting, but not very relevant to me. So I think about what’s relevant.
Maybe to someone, recovering from brain injury is relevant. They will think about that.
There’s nothing wrong with focusing on what’s relevant to you in a writing.
The big difference is that a smart contract is a running, stateful, immutable piece of software. Alternatively, I can run software with an MIT license by myself, but I can always modify the data or API without any approval of the users.
In practice almost every vaguely live protocol has god mode where some "Sam" can upgrade the contract to whatever they want, because bug risk in immutable contracts is too high (VCs who fund the projects don't want to be sued for bugs). So this becomes functionally equivalent to a SQL server just slow and taking 100x the server capacity.
This is interesting. Essentially a reference piece of software where anyone on the network can run the exact same bits (assuming they have compatible hardware). But also the ability to extend or compose where the new system will also have a reference identity.
This may have use in defining standards. You could have a standards authority without any actual standards body. Free but standard.
If you build a centralized platform, you get to act as a middle man and skim off profit off every transaction, which you then reinvest in advertising and feature development.
On the other hand, if you build a decentralized platform, you've essentially commoditized yourself: you can't skim off profits, because if you do, a cheaper node will just pop up, leading to a race to the bottom.
Ironically, the actual system that exists and existed pre-Uber in NYC (TLC) is about as close to a real decentralized system as you're going to get. Like most good decentralized systems, it relies on a small centralized core (the government) to enforce a few basic invariants (taxi drivers must be trained, licensed, pass background checks, vehicles require insurance and must pick up passengers in certain zones and not in others, etc) and offer a few basic primitive operations (get driver license, get FHV car license, get base license, etc) to get involved with the market.
Beyond that it's all decentralized -- anyone can, after jumping through the right hoops, buy a taxicab or medalliion, affiliate with a base, become a driver, etc. A passenger can easily find a car by walking about half a block to the nearest avenue, putting their arm up in the air (in much of Manhattan) or by using the Curb app (in less busy areas).
