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by pcthrowaway 1591 days ago
> I admit it is possible I'm just unable to see the value of these things, but I also have a lot of company in that with people who are way smarter than me.

I feel like there has to be a name for the fallacy here. If you looked at the cryptocurrency space, especially the blockchain builders, you'd likely find a lot of people who you'd be willing to accept are smarter than you working on it. Silvio Micali and Vitalik Buterin are 2 big names that come to mind (I don't hold/use algorand FWIW, but Silvio seems like one of the brightest minds in the field solely based on accomplishments).

1 comments

Sure, but equally there are plenty of smarter-than-me people who think it's all a giant scam, so I'm inclined to trust my instincts. After all, just because they're smarter than me doesn't mean they aren't trying to scam me or haven't got caught up in some bullshit fantasy.

Besides, if the technology is actually valuable in some way I cannot yet perceive but that will become obvious over time, then I can just wait until it becomes ubiquitous and reap the benefits without risking anything.

Absolutely, and the tokens don't need to have multi-trillion dollar market caps for this to happen either.

The tokenization of everything is a mixed bag. On one hand it leads to perverse incentives that result in an incredibly low signal-to-noise ration. On the other hand it enables types of consensus that don't exist when there's not a penalty for misbehaviour (specifically for proof-of-stake and staking, the token makes it possible to reward network participants, while making the cost of attacking the network higher than the market cap of the network).