[tarsinge]

I really did not like that video. There are some interesting ideas but the tone is insufferable for me, not a fan of superficial punchlines and logical fallacies wrapped as deep thoughts, no matter if I agree or not with the point.

[officialchicken]

>superficial punchlines and logical fallacies

I thought the writing and editing were excellent and well thought out. Can you give a specific example of when a logical fallacy was employed in the video?

[tarsinge]

Take the part 2: Personal comments on Vitalik, an history of scams during the period Ethereum was created but not directly related, a 100k grant Vitalik got which I fails to see the relevance too, a broad critic that can apply to any entrepreneur/programmer having a dunning kruger thinking they can easily disrupt an industry with software. Conclusion:

> In terms of improvment over Bitcoin, Ethereum has many. It's not hard. Bitcoin sucks. Ethereum solves none of them and introduce a whole new suite of problems driven by technofetishistic egotism of assuming that programmers are uniquely suited to solve society's problem.

It's nice prose but for me that part was really mostly appeal to emotions/ridicule and association/composition fallacies. To clarify the latter: scams and ridiculous marketing are a problem, but unfortunately that's not enough to make a logical point. Their proportion neither.

Again there are good points, but it's weirdly positioned. For me it's a rant, but instead it's presented as a calm scientific/neutral content which I don't find very honest (and quite ironic given the subject). But I'm not a native english speaker, so maybe it's just me misinterpreting the tone.

[yumaikas]

It is a rant, a well argued one, with a lot of salient points, IMO.

And ridicule is part of the point of text (not subtext) of the essay. Dan is making an emotional argument as much as he's making a logical one, because a lot of people will hear the emotional one where the logical one would just bounce off. Making something harmful actually seem uncool is a valid tactic, IMO.

Like, calling out Vitalik as a butthurt Warlock main is an attempt to make his origin story around the EVM seem to have a pathetic origin. Instead of applying himself to getting better at the new warlock meta, he went off and created a thing that has enabled a lot of real economic harm.

And pointing out the connection to Peter Thiel is as much about pointing out the involvement of big money in cryptocurrency as any specific character of Vitalik.

And it's not like Vitalik hasn't had a lot of chances to go "damn, the EVM is being used for a lot of harm. Maybe it wasn't worth it?"

Or maybe he has, and I (and Dan, because I think he'd have brought that up) have missed it?

[Animats]

I watched the whole thing, which is too long. He gets a bit carried away at some points, but he doesn't seem to be factually wrong.

He makes a good point - cryptocurrencies are a transfer of money from late adopters to early adopters. That's implicit in anything where "line goes up" but there is no revenue, no dividends, it's zero sum, and there's no exit.

The NFT thing seems to be on the way out. The NFT industry is Axie Infinity, OpenSea, Bored Ape Yacht Club, and the little guys. Axie Infinity recently crashed hard. Their Smooth Love Potion token, the one players grind for, is down to $0.01246 (was around $0.35 at peak). Their other token, Axie, is down to about half the peak. OpenSea seems to be stalling out with limited liquidity - too many items with high prices but no bids. People are frantically issuing new NFTs every day, but the available sucker supply seems to have dried up. It's hard to tell, because wash sales to pump the price are so easy in the NFT space. This whole thing is starting to look like Pet Rock 2.0.

Bitcoin and Etherium don't look so good right now. Both are around half of peak.

[alexb_]

At the end of the day, it is a video which serves to further actual discussion. There are going to be points where he gets "carried away" because that's the entire point - simply listing the facts doesn't really contribute much, the video uses the facts that we have and extrapolates a conclusion. Crypto currencies, in their current state, are just learning WHY centralized systems exist. While we all would love to be decentralized all the time (and some decentralization is a good idea!), these people end up just using centralized systems to more easily manage their "decentralized" systems.

And really, I don't think this should be surprising for most people. This is exactly what happened to Email - a decentralized system that also just happens to be 90% controlled by 1 company because people much prefer the benefits of centralization to the "freedoms" of decentralization.