Crypto scam stories have become boring. How about one about something — anything — crypto-related that’s not bullshit? Now that would be a “man bites dog” story!
I run/ran a website where you could shop on AliExpress using crypto and advertised it as the only legitimate crypto website around. I had universally positive reviews but made low 5 figures in profit over the course of ~4y (not terrible as passive income considering the operating costs were nearly zero) before the latest crash dropped usage to nothing and I let bit rot take over.
Unfortunately the vast majority of crypto adopters are just riding the bubble for investment and have no interest in any other use cases, which are admittedly limited.
> There's legitimate crypto stuff…it's just not interesting
I know what you meant when you wrote that, but the second meaning (not interesting => no added value) is significant as well. After 15 (!!) years nobody seems to have found an application that causes people to say “hey, I’ll switch to that [despite the early adopter limitations true of any new tech] because the benefits are so huge for what I do”. Well, except crimeing of course.
The only “success” of your list was a wallet. Enabling tech is pretty thin gruel. I mean, compilers were/are successful, but the real story is the programs people run through them not the compilers themselves.
Sure, it's a fairly useless right wing technology mostly in the service of the ideologies of Von Mises and Austrian Economics but we're all adults here.
Good things can come from anywhere. Stanford, for instance, was founded after a dream where a ghost of a guy's dead teenager appeared (who bears the namesake of the institution[1]) and was initially run by his wife who made her executive decisions by talking to spirits over oujia boards but it'd be foolish to hang that around the instution's neck today and dismiss its contributions.
In the same way, crypto work might have indirect long lasting positive impacts in things such as CPU efficiency, chip design, algorithm research, parallel computing, and machine learning with specific focus on time-series. We should be able to look past the Do Kwon fiasco for that.
[1] it's officially "Leland Stanford Junior University" - who was the ghost - read "Who Killed Jane Stanford?" for more info https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324004332
> crypto work might have indirect long lasting positive impacts in things such as CPU efficiency, chip design, algorithm research, parallel computing, and machine learning with specific focus on time-series.
I cannot see any connection between Markel tree algorithms and chip design (or any of the other domains you mention). Can you point me to such work in these areas?
I agree. They’ve been replaced by ai “investment” schemes. The pump just moved onto something else, issue is though that the average joe wont profit from it, quite the contrary, their data and livelihoods are being stolen.
Blockchain has the potential to completely replace noteraries, real state deeds, most types of IDs, medical records, all sorts of contracts and digital signing. A lot of government systems could be put on the blockchain and become interoperable with government systems of other countries. It is hard enough to keep medical records systems within a single country already.
This alone is worth billions of dollars in saved bureaucracy overhead. Unfortunately it relies on governments and bureaucrats relishing control of the bureaucracy so it is really hard to push forward. Especially considering there is not a lot of money to be made in these areas, in fact it reduces the amount of money spent on middle-man.
The icing on the cake is that any country that implements a blockchain systems for a certain bureaucratic function will most likely make it open source (for transparency reasons), meaning other countries could just git clone the algorithms and implement any extra requirements. A lot of the prosperity of the west world came from strong, stable, predictable institutions. Those institutions could be automated and exported to the developing world making it much harder for corruption to take place.
