| I appreciate your thoughts and, perhaps to your surprise, entirely agree. I'm calm about it now because I've had years to reflect and learn. I began in 2013 buying small sums of bitcoin around ~$50. I amassed ~$500k by 2017, the most I had ever seen in my life, and throughout the year I made some profitable trades on btc-e.com. I had a competitive advantage on that platform because my orders would be filled prior to the blocks those transactions would be in. btc-e was seized by US authorities in July, but much of their funds were already gone. This was entirely my failure. What did I learn? * diversify crypto holdings (such as OP's hot and cold wallets) * diversify outside of crypto * use regulated platforms (traditionally these are banks) * understand fundamentals (I was so painfully naive) * help others avoid these pitfalls (if I had a single friend I trusted to disclose my holdings, I'd almost certainly have made better choices) I just responded to another comment below, which you might find helpful https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28910361. The foundational elements a blockchain provides - namely transparency and ownership of digital assets - are absolutely critical to our future as a society. Crypto in its current forms is mostly noise, but there are also really pivotal things being build by people I choose to trust far more than the World Economic Forum. |
I'm not 100% sold, but I'm leaning that way, hence my phrasing of "While the technology is interesting and has some intriguing use cases".
I feel like the "good" use cases aren't particularly sexy however, and thus are in danger of getting lost. Additionally, there's a ton of people that want to throw "the blockchain" at a problem, and end up overcomplicating spaces that have no need for it.