[acdha]

> But cars had value. They have value. They had value from day 1.

This is so true: cars have massive externalities but the 20th century was spend rebuilding the world around them because they were useful. You saw that immediately and the true costs only became more apparent years later.

Cryptocurrency is as if Robert Moses had redesigned NYC around pet rock warehousing on the theory that someone would later find a use for them, and the warehouses needed to burn coal continuously.

[joepie91_]

> This is so true: cars have massive externalities but the 20th century was spend rebuilding the world around them because they were useful.

Well, no, not really.

While cars do have non-zero usefulness, the reason we rebuilt the world around them was because of car manufacturer lobbying, not because of some shared revelation about their value to society.

[acdha]

There's some truth to that but the main point was simply that anyone who bought a car, especially earlier on, saw immediate benefits. Later on they might have reconsidered if they learned how traffic jams work, saw the effects of pollution or injuries, etc. but by then they were most likely financially invested with major commitments to an automobile-based lifestyle.

That's the problem with these kind of things: the early adopters see benefits but probably not the costs, that convinces other people to join them, and it quickly reaches the point where the easiest/most profitable is to continue down that path. If you're the average suburban homeowner, you might hate the effect that sitting in traffic has on your health and time but if you can't afford to live next to the office you're probably going to treat it as inevitable since dramatic changes affect your property values.

[knorker]

Even if the costs had been obvious from day one, unlike cryptocurrencies they also had value.

Many things do. Cryptocurrencies don't.

[acdha]

No argument here: in the second decade, the only cash-positive usage is convincing other people to buy them. That’s a long time to have nothing to show despite such massive cash flow into the system.

TBL transformed the world in a few years for a tiny fraction of the cost despite much higher barriers to adoption.

[noxer]

There is no cash flow "into the system". Its a forever repeated nonsense idea. If you exchange fiat or maybe gold for fiat there is no cash flow into anything its just an exchange. Crypto to crypto or to fiat is exactly the same. No cash goes anywhere other than to the seller.

(obviously ignoring fees and such but they also dont go into anything its just paying someone for providing a service)

If you look at crypto as the huge trading space and you dont see it produce anything is simply because its not supposed to. You look at the space that just exchanges stuff. If you look at a grocery store and you dont see anything produced you are right. The store is just where people exchange stuff. Its not where value is created or where you would find innovation in producing something.

[acdha]

What do you think happened to all of the money from VCs, big consulting companies, etc. which was spent on blockchain services? How many people have received a full-time paycheck for years for the express purpose of building something worth using?

Your grocery store analogy illustrates why there are so many skeptics: I don't have to ask people whether they use a grocery store because they have food on their shelves and there's a steady stream of people entering and leaving the store. Blockchain systems, on the other hand, are never mentioned other than by people who have a vested interest in selling the system rather than doing anything with it. People say they're going shopping to buy something for dinner, but it's extremely hard to find someone saying they're buying cryptocurrency because there's something it helps them do faster/better/cheaper rather than just hoping they'll be able to sell the same token to someone else for more than they paid for it.

[noxer]

Where do you see how much VC money was spend in the crypt space? No one really knows, that's the whole point. People see BTC being worth 60k and exchanges having billion of trade volume. All of that is a useless indicator of how much money is actually spend to solve a problem or at least try to solve one.

I'm certain millions of dollars has been spend and probably nothing or not much came out of it so far but there is no metric and nothing to compare it to so how can people come to the conclusion that too much was spend for too little return? I assume they look at hype and trading and all that and this is what leads to the concision. Whether the conclusion is wrong or not, we dont know but the reasoning is wrong.

Even trough there is nothing to compare it to, a huge junk of VC money is spend for things that eventually fail to give return. Its part of the game. And any sane person would agree that if it fails people stop to put more money in for the same ideas. So how do people think that VC are just stupid and shovel money in stuff for 10 years and counting with no return? Maybe just maybe this is not really the case and there is tremendous change coming for the way financial system work. Its just not something that happens quickly and it certainly not some ETF or anything the public talks about because they see numbers in $ value. That's just people playing around with what these systems allow them to make. Its like the chain-mails or ascii-art and all that stuff that hardly anyone could see as solving any problem but then again e-mail did solve a problem even trough the tech was (/is) horribly bad.

>Blockchain systems, on the other hand, are never mentioned other than by people who have a vested interest in selling the system rather than doing anything with it.

You dont hear people talk about how crypto helps them because it does not for the most part. They don't use it. Its also for the most part not meant to be used by them (the end user). They may use a product that's build on top of it some day. Or even already do [1] without knowing. DLTs are just global distributed databases where everyone can verify the state and rules. We have no clue what kind of problems this can solve but its probably not solving much of peoples everyday problems or if so only indirectly without them knowingly using the system. Just like most people never notices that they use TCP/IP. TCP/IP was once a very stupid idea if you would have tired to tell people what it is. They would have told you that phones already work and that TCP/IP at that time would not even allow you to make a phone call. Why would you encode some tiny messages to send over a wire if you could just call the other side instead.

One of the end-user focused ideas that may become reality in the next years is web monetization [2] where your browser steams fraction of cents while you watch anything on the web. Maybe its payed content only or may it removes the ads if you pay. The idea itself is old (subscriptions). But subscriptions do not scale. No one wants subscription for every website and online service. If you could pay them directly as you use, it would work for all who implement this. No prepaid or monthly billing. Pay as you use or donate as you use. This stuff is pioneered by "crypto people" because it relies on p2p value transfer. The current way we move value can not handle micropayment. You can not stream fraction of cents to someone if everything has to go to a third party first and that third party has to find a way to get the money to the recipient who may or may not be a customer of them. Its slow expensive or completely impossible due to d incompatible jurisdictions and such stuff. Its kinda works like phones did once and it should move on to work like the internet does.

[1]https://twitter.com/mercury_fx_ltd/status/108591501163618713... They are using crypto to settle peoples transaction within seconds. Obviously their customers wont know or care but if they pay less is somewhats solving a real problem.

[2] https://webmonetization.org/ Proposed as a W3C standard.