Meh. People will try to get rich off anything— crypto, the internet, SMS scams, every type of physical business, legit or otherwise.
As a hacker I want to find out what else we can do with it. What surprising things can we build?
What if we could use some kind of blockchain tech to incentivise people to do great things despite what you’ve seen so far? (Some people really are trying to do that.)
What if we can help activists all over the world with Tor and end to end encryption?
What if the internet can give a voice to people who never had one?
What if we can find a better way than copyright to compensate people for their creations with restricting sharing and reuse?
What if we can build and online encyclopaedia many orders of magnitude grander in scope than anything that’s gone before?
Let someone else worry about what the grifters are doing to screw us this time.
That vision of bitcoin died somewhere around 2017, back when blocks filled, commerce ground to a halt and nobody in charge thought this was a problem.
Because the people that were in control already figured that what they wanted to use the system for is to buy low and sell high for huge profits, and so it didn't matter if the network didn't perform well for regular commerce. You don't need a lot of TPS if your ideal scenario is to ever make two.
The reason Bitcoin got so large so quickly is the same reason that "Crypto" got large so quickly. The majority of people who "invest" in Bitcoin aren't trying to figure out a way to trade goods and services in a way that undermines the Federal Reserve and the IRS, they're trying to increase their holdings in USD in order to better participate in the existing economy.
As a hacker I want to find out what else we can do with it. What surprising things can we build?
What if we could use some kind of blockchain tech to incentivise people to do great things despite what you’ve seen so far? (Some people really are trying to do that.)
What if we can help activists all over the world with Tor and end to end encryption?
What if the internet can give a voice to people who never had one?
What if we can find a better way than copyright to compensate people for their creations with restricting sharing and reuse?
What if we can build and online encyclopaedia many orders of magnitude grander in scope than anything that’s gone before?
Let someone else worry about what the grifters are doing to screw us this time.
Let’s see the hackers hack.