This has been my biggest issue with cultocurrency since it’s inception.
The market cap of the whole lot is made up of maybe 0.04% innovative signing and 99.96% magic beans.
Useful use cases of the smidge of innovation can be exploited by the megacaps to extract whatever actual value there is - this current cesspit of Ponzi schemes will not be required.
That argument was used in the early internet stages too, and hasn’t aged well. Where are printed encyclopaedia or yellow pages or sears these days? All in a pittance of their former self.
The ability to do distributed trusted transactions will change how business is done. How and when is another question.
That argument was not used in the early Internet stages. Even back when it was proprietary bulletin boards solely for use in universities, people were already communicating, and sharing news articles on it. The Web started as an internal CERN project in 1989. In 1993, the code was released to the public and email lists were set up by CERN. In 1994, SCO and Mosaic had already partnered with Pizza Hut to allow ordering Pizza online. Yahoo! and Amazon were both founded in 1994.
The arguments against the Internet were not because people thought the technology was useless, but just push-back against grandiose claims that the Internet would solve war, or famine, or education. John Sculley's job was to sell Apple Macs to classrooms, and often said stuff like this:
> Imagine a classroom with a window on all the world's knowledge. Imagine a teacher with the capability to bring to life any image, any sound, any event. Imagine a student with the power to visit any place on earth at any time in history. Imagine a screen that can display in vivid color the inner workings of a cell, the births and deaths of stars, the clashed of aries, and the triumphs of art. And then imagine that you have access to all of this and more by exerting little more effort than simply asking that it appear. It seems like magic even today. Yet the ability to provide this kind of learning environment is within our grasp.
The famous Clifford Stoll article was pushing against rhetoric like that, not against the Internet as a whole.
"Imagine a classroom with a window on all the world's knowledge...a student with the power to visit any place on earth at any time in history. Imagine a screen that can display in vivid color the inner workings of a cell, the births and deaths of stars, the clashed of aries, and the triumphs of art. And then imagine that you have access to all of this and more by exerting little more effort than simply asking that it appear."
This is a literal description of the Internet we take for granted in 2022. If anything it undersells the reality of what we have today, since it misses so many new communication and learning technologies that we couldn't even imagine back then.
The point here is that certain new companies will emerge that displace incumbents using the new technology. Amazon almost certainly has always been compared to sears, Walmart etc. sears is bankrupt. Walmart and retailers in general have had stunted growth.
There will be equivalent crypto disrupters that will make incumbents go south.
But with Amazon, there's a reason they've grown as large as they are. They have a model that produced the world's most successful logistics business. They provide a service that is useful to people.
Now they've produced the world's most successful mainframe computing business by using those massive revenues to build it around the world. A service, that's useful to people.
Is there honestly a single thing any of the current batch of crypto startups actually do that is both useful and better than the status quo? (And I mean useful other than to other magic token gamblers).
Everyone involved is so blinded by moooning gainz that they don't see the emperor has no clothes. It's a Ponzi. The whole market. Ponzi.
If it helps, I'd think that Bitcoin and a couple of others will stick around as smashing good Ponzi schemes for a good long while.
There isn't "disruption" happening "in the space". De-Fi is not novel, it's already been done long before Bitcoin. Many of those companies went to the wall because the counter-party risk is still present even without institutional underwriting. Turns out there's a reason you charge higher interest to less reliable borrowers, even with collateral. Shocker.
And the tragedy of all of it is that this relentless bullshit train, that would have been illegal under the system it's trying to replace, is going to claim another few million victims when Celsius goes tits up later this week and takes every other lender with it.
It’s easy in hindsight, but I think digital cameras had lower quality initially, and lower capacity, but it was clear that it’s a question of scaling until they replace film. Especially with instant feedback. Similarly early amazon was already useful for what it did.
> The ability to do distributed trusted transactions will change how business is done.
Trusted transactions are already done. The distributed part doesn’t solve a realistic problem in 99.99999% of use-cases. That’s why I think cryptocurrency feels like a solution looking for a problem.
To be fair, digital cameras still aren't close to film in some key ways (but excel in others).
Good quality film stock, even from the 40's, is an incredible artefact owing to it being essentially infinite resolution. Sure, there are artifacts and degradation, but if you get a chance to check out a 4K transfer of something like Casablanca it's really quite mind-blowing. It looks like it was shot this year, albeit in monochrome.
Amazon and Google.
This has been my biggest issue with cultocurrency since it’s inception.
The market cap of the whole lot is made up of maybe 0.04% innovative signing and 99.96% magic beans.
Useful use cases of the smidge of innovation can be exploited by the megacaps to extract whatever actual value there is - this current cesspit of Ponzi schemes will not be required.