[nfin]

in the beginning of the 21st century, some said cars are not for the masses.

They were hard to start for example . You would get your hands dirty and needed some power to turn that hand crank.

When those problems got solved and more cars got on the road it would become dangerous with so many cars, and people suggested you need to learn it properly (and get a driver license). Some thought not many would get such a license to drive a still dangerous machine (no airbags or even ABS at that time).

In the end you are ready to do the work (learn) if it is worth it.

And if it is worth it… that nobody knows (in the western world the answer is mostly “no” right now, at least if one trusts the complex economic systems to work well for the next decades).

If it’s worth the hassle, more technologies will get built to help.

[grey-area]

And if it is worth it… that nobody knows

At the moment, it's quite clear that current cryptocurrencies are solving problems nobody has (trustless transactions), in a way nobody likes the consequences of (distributed) and are magnets for fraud and grift (too many to list).

Now the idea of giving people cryptographic keys is really attractive and unlocks a bunch of use-cases (most of which crypto proponents have claimed in vain for a decades crypto could solve), but there are a few problems (which crypto doesn't even try to solve): how to restore keys when they lose them or they are stolen, and related how to tie those keys to real-world identity in a meaningful way, how to rollback fraud and punish grifters, etc... for most of these you need a trusted central authority and also trusted, verified identity.

Maybe currencies are just the wrong angle to attack this problem from?

Unfortunately that's a really hard problem - if someone can tackle that and tie it to real world verified identity, there are a gold-mine of opportunities to solve. BUT it will require trusted central services for trust, rolling back transactions in case of fraud and identify verification to keep grifters and scammers out. When you do all that you end up with something far more like our current banking system (though it does have significant problems I don't wish to downplay, it also has hundreds of years of scam protection built-in).

[nfin]

> At the moment, it's quite clear that current cryptocurrencies are solving problems nobody has (trustless transactions)

That’s an assumption, not a fact. And trustless transactions might not be the only problem that it tries to solve. What about predictable money supply. Trustless custody (instead of just “trustless transactions), … All these will not appeal to a lot more people today (but nobody and not many is very different, and that ratio can change with future technologies being built)

> how to restore keys when they lose them or they are stolen, and related how to tie those keys to real-world identity in a meaningful way, how to rollback fraud and punish grifters, etc... for most of these you need a trusted central authority and also trusted, verified identity.

The first part (how to restore keys when they lose them or they are stolen) does not necessarily mean that there is no decentralized solution. Social recovery (Shamir Secret Sharing + social recovery; or safer some multisig + social recovery) is being worked on.

The second part “how to tie those keys to real-world identity ” is much harder (specially if one values anonimity to avoid 1984 scenarios).

[lottin]

The money supply is not observable. Prices are observable. People care about price stability not about stability of the money supply.

[nfin]

price stability has it own set of problems.

If a good was regulated to have a stable price nobody would be incentivized to find a clever solution to solve a future crisis with high demand for that good

[lottin]

Price stability refers to the stability of the price level. It has nothing to do with changes in individual prices which are unrelated to changes in the price level.

[grey-area]

> What about predictable money supply?

It's clear that current cryptocurrencies are absolutely not solving that problem either. There's a fact if you like facts, consult the Bitcoin price.

> Trustless custody

Not clear to me that people outside the crypto bubble want this; people want trusted counterparties, not trustless obfuscated counterparties. It is IMO a solution looking for a problem.

I'd be a lot more sympathetic to this space if wasn't full of grifters and fraud. As it is I think the crypto experiment has irreversibly been tainted by that association (and by people losing lots of money), and I would not trust a 'trustless' solution from any of the current crypto companies or individuals.

> how to restore keys when they lose them or they are stolen

This is a v. hard problem, why make it 100x harder by insisting on decentralising the solution? And then 1000x harder by insisting on anonymity? Those may be properties of your chosen solution, which is I suspect why you're insisting they are necessary, but they are a bad design IMO - these are the fundamental design flaws of current cryptocurrencies.

Normal people don't keep backup keys on a second device etc etc, web of trust is a very old idea which has been tried quite a few times (see pgp for example, keybase for another corporate one), and you need a way for a normal person to prove they are who they say they are and regain access via courts or a central authority, take over inherited accounts etc. At some point these systems have to interface with the real world and real world authorities and laws/courts.

Just to propose alternative solutions to safely storing cryptographic keys (note those are useful for all sorts of things and unrelated to cryptocurrencies):

Corporations like Apple, Google could provide such a service, as they already own most of the infrastructure. There are obvious and significant downsides to this.

Enlightened governments could propose such an infrastructure of identity verification and private keys, there are obviously problems with that too, but it could be workable if you trust your government.

Utopian techno-geeks could also provide such an infrastructure, but somebody has to pay for it, and people fundamentally have to trust the people who create and run the system - that's a hard problem without financial incentives for the devs/maintainers. One example of an existing system is DNS and another is certificate authorities - both are not great but do work in the real world for their intended purpose.

I do believe at some point we'll come to solve this problem of digital identity and authentication because it is so fundamental, both for humans and corporate entities. I'm not sure we'll like the solution which ends up winning, and I certainly don't think cryptocurrencies are a contender.

[nfin]

how is the bitcoin price supposed to reflect the supply.

The supply is pretty much math.

Yes, the longterm price trend is an indicator of people valuing that fact (and other properties). Short term is governed a lot more by media, fear, …

[lynx23]

> in the beginning of the 21st century, some said cars are not for the masses.

I guess you mean the 20th century?

In any case, those people were actually right. A car for everyone and their daughter is one of the biggest contributing factor for pollution and noise.

[jjslocum3]

This entire comment seems to reprise the FTX/Larry David Super Bowl commercial. I'm sure there's a term-of-art for the tactic in debating circles (like "straw-man argument," or "appeal to authority"). I think of it as the "disingenuous comparison."

I can't begin to list all the ways in which comparing the auto industry of the 20th century to crypto of today breaks down. For starters, automobiles promised a massive demonstrable value-add to society from the get-go. Crypto, as others here have pointed out, is a solution looking for a problem.

So far, every application of crypto has actually destroyed value for the process it seeks to replace[1], by adding layers of busy-work on top of an already-working process. If it were of value as a self-contained, isolated ecosystem, then things might be different; but where it interfaces with the existing economic infrastructure within which it needs to operate (and which it seeks to replace), any economic efficiencies bleed out rapidly.

[1] Edit: And I'm not even considering the scams

[unicornmama]

Cars got people from point A to B faster than horses. That much would have been clear even at the time because people understood trains and the potential speeds of locomotives.

Crypto doesn’t do anything faster, cheaper or safer. In fact it’s the opposite: slower, more expensive and brittle. In fact, even if it could advance in those dimensions, it doesn’t seem to offer any competitive advantage over the incumbent technologies.

[zoover2020]

A car solves a real problem, clearly crypto only causes them.

[dmitriid]

> in the beginning of the 21st century, some said cars are not for the masses.

And there I was thinking that the stupid comparisons of crypto to cars or internet finally stopped.

> And if it is worth it… that nobody knows

Tell me you know nothing about history without telling me you know nothing about history