[zer01]

Replace your arguments for crypto with arguments for the internet, and zoom back to the mid 90s.

There were a ton of shady internet companies capitalizing on this sort of hype and swindling people out of their hard earned money. Beanie babies were also huge.

Do you know what else was happening? The IETF was finding its feet as an org, RFCs were being written and iterated on, the building blocks of the modern internet were being built behind the scenes, and companies like Amazon were realizing that their value was not selling books but building a massive logistic network that could compete with brick and mortar stores. Porn companies (widely seen as morally reprehensible/unsightly) were also figuring out video streaming and PayPal was figuring out how to deal with online payments.

Yet, if you read the news and weren’t building in the space, you’d probably come to the same conclusions as you are today - the internet is a fad that will die out soon because there’s nothing of substance to it and it’s all just greater fool hype.

Zooming back to today - I’d implore you to go look at the research being done right now in the cryptography space - things like zero knowledge proofs, multi party computation, and threshold signature schemes are becoming more viable as building blocks every day. Same with a shift in mentality from centralized trust to decentralized control enabled by some of these cryptographic primitives.

Is every crypto project going to be the next Google? Of course not, but the entire point of putting VC money into the space is to push the space forward as a whole (along with spurring research), eventually leading to the next Amazon/Google/Facebook/etc. and pushing humanity forward in some direction.

New tools mean fertile ground for innovation, and VCs are interested in finding and pumping money into fertile ground since they usually have massively outsized returns.

Are they always right? Nope, but Marc Andreessen was around in the 90s, built one of the first web browsers, and co founded Netscape. So if nothing else he’s seen what unrealized fertile ground looks like, and a $4.5B fund signals that he sees it again in the space. Of course a more cynical view is that he purely sees the ability to enrich himself and his fund via pump and dump schemes without caring how it’s done but that’s something that only time will tell I suppose.

[Comevius]

The internet was just as viable in 1995. We were doing commerce over phone lines using computers for 20 years at that point. By the time there was an internet nobody had a reason to question it, or desperately try to find use cases for it.

The cryptography space has a lot of promise, but the VC money is not being pumped into better privacy or confidence (which is better than trustlessness). It's being pumped and dumped, because securities fraud is where the money is. The idea is to prop up the image of crypto until you can dump.

Blockchain technologies are not the right tool for everything. They can eliminate the double spending problem in a decentralized way, but there are trade-offs involved in being able to tolerate a large amount of faulty or malicious nodes (for problems that require coordination) and they are fundamental. Blockchain technologies lock you out of efficiently solving a lot of problems.

The Web3 projects I have seen so far would not be able to compete with their Web2 counterpart. They don't know their customers, they are hard to understand, difficult to use, they are trying to bank on artificial scarcity as if it's a new invention no one else tried. If your mother can't understand your Web3 project chances are you aren't going to get your big break.

[loceng]

Eventually the gamblers and gullible will run out and those already financially vested in coin of your choice who on the weekly or monthly buy $x more, also adding to and keeping a reserve of $y to buy during dips which also helps to make the price look artificially more stable than it is [not to mention when billion dollar reserves get spent to counter the bottom completely falling out]. After that it will only be through aggressive tactics including regulatory capture that force more people, let's say 50% of population adopted, they will need the remaining 50% to adopt - to give them the basket, leaving them holding it - with no one else to buy it from them.

What will, and is happening, you just don't see it as much - it's not as obvious because no one is making money or wanting to make money by taking a stand against Bitcoin, and draw the attention of the heavily invested ideological mob of HODLers - whereas everyone taking a stand for Bitcoin is financially incentivized to promote it with whatever true or false rhetoric and propaganda they find works best in the present climate; perhaps the best simplified comparison I heard is that Bitcoin is like Mary Kay for men.