[damon_c]

This whole thing was like if there was a jQuery bubble back in 2008 or so. jQuery came along and was amazing and useful and enabled a whole bunch of great new ways to do things and made a lot of stuff much easier.

Now imagine it also enabled a huge range of financial adventures which got some people rich and some people poor and caused most normal people to hate jQuery. That would be silly. jQuery is still a useful tool. It's not just for pumping and dumping tokens... It's great for manipulating DOM elements too!

I hope maybe this crash will help people realize that public permissionless distributed databases and the cryptographic primitives that make them secure can, like jQuery, be used to generate new amazing software products that previously could not exist and are not just about get rich quick schemes.

--edited for formatting/clarity

[paxys]

The difference is that people actually did a lot of useful things with jQuery instead of just talking about its potential nonstop for a decade.

[maerF0x0]

there are isolated cases of useful things done with some of the top names in crypto.

El Salvador helped break the backs of the international money transfer companies charging usurious prices for a simple ledger entry.[2]

Cardano is helping to build projects that are corruption and coercion resistant[1]

I'm sure others could come up with examples.

What has been unreal is the bubble though. People have tried to get rich quick off these things, meaning the use and utility value is much less than the speculative. Some of these projects have brought millions and maybe billions of value, but collectively maybe even now they seem to be over priced.

[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/09/el-salvador-bitcoin-move-cou...

[1]: https://africa.cardano.org/

[damon_c]

People are doing useful things with public distributed databases and cryptography as well. Unfortunately it has been largely overshadowed by the greed. This is an artifact of human involvement.

Mathematics implementations and new data storage paradigms are still our friends here at HN. Aren't they?