[leppr]

If anything, crypto at least seems to indirectly put food on your table, articbull. I would find it hard to believe you don't get any compensation from religiously covering every HN comment sections about crypto with misinformation. Surely your motives can't simply be the fear of being out of a job if bigtech fades into irrelevance. AI would logically be a way bigger threat to your occupation.

Here are some stats for any passerby who might be convinced to think crypto really has ~zero non-criminal usage [1]. Surely calling 5-25% of many countries' populations criminals (including the US), should be relegated to a fringe extremist view.

[1] https://triple-a.io/crypto-ownership-data/

[kkielhofner]

> https://triple-a.io/crypto-ownership-data/

Triple A is a crypto payments company with much more self-interest than those of us who are skeptical towards crypto. The base methodology for all of their statistics is ridiculous: "Let's take a cherry-picked dubious survey of crypto adoption done by the Bank of Canada and extrapolate those numbers to the entire world POPULATION". Bonus points for their "creativity" with this methodology - worldwide population is roughly 8 billion while internet users (the real TAM for crypto) is closer to 5 billion. So already you need to shave at least 35% off their numbers.

Their baseline "420m crypto users worldwide" estimate (which is already bad considering TAM is > 5 billion internet users) can be easily debunked to at least 1/3 of that number (100m - which is still incredibly optimistic) by spending an hour looking at block explorers across the top 10 chains (evaluating daily/monthly transaction counts, tx/rx address pairs actually used for daily/monthly transactions, etc). When I last did it to get to the 100m number I was VERY fair to crypto - round up everywhere, assume address = user (it doesn't), count each address as a unique user per chain, etc. If crypto had anything resembling the legit DAU/MAU metrics you see from publicly traded companies the total for the entire crypto space would likely be closer to 50m (or less).

I'm always fascinated by this - crypto advocates constantly talk about the transparency, openness, etc provided by blockchain while simultaneously touting those absurd Triple-A statistics. You will never see them do a real (yet still easy) analysis like I have because the real numbers look terrible.

If there was any real interest in the crypto ecosystem succeeding crypto enthusiasts would take a real hard look at the real stats, acknowledge they have a problem with adoption, and try to fix it. They're just too personally invested financially and thus spend their time "pumping their bags".

I doubt a FAANG or other non-crypto employee is worried in the slightest by the "threat" of an entire ecosystem that has acquired a whopping 50m-100m users over 14 years.

[quickthrowman]

> Here are some stats for any passerby who might be convinced to think crypto really has ~zero non-criminal usage [1]. Surely calling 5-25% of many countries' populations criminals (including the US), should be relegated to a fringe extremist view.

Simply owning digital tokens is not a real world usage of those tokens, full stop.

That being said, I can fully accept that 5-25% of a countries population is gullible enough to buy cryptocurrency.

[leppr]

> Simply owning digital tokens is not a real world usage of those tokens, full stop.

It's as much real world usage, as people owning stocks and precious metals is.

> I can fully accept that 5-25% of a countries population is gullible enough to buy cryptocurrency.

In many countries, it's the 75% of the population saving in their local fiat currency that are the gullible ones. I know we all love United States Dollars, but in many local economies, there aren't enough of them to go around. Acquiring, storing and transacting with cryptocurrencies can be easier, and more secure and discrete than going to your local black market USD dealer and stashing stacks of bills under your mattress.

[arcticbull]

> In many countries, it's the 75% of the population saving in their local fiat currency that are the gullible ones.

Nobody is supposed to save fiat except as a liquidity cushion against personal tail risk for which you pay the spread between interest rates and inflation. Nobody has ever advised people to save fiat anywhere. They advice is to keep an emergency savings account and invest the rest.

[WeylandYutani]

I'm sure that a lot of people tried out crypto in the boom.

The number of people actually using it on a daily basis is probably somewhat lower.

[smoldesu]

If talking shit about cryptocurrency is a more reliable job than supporting it, I'd argue its time to move on.

There was never a hope for Bitcoin replacing or even competing with regulated currencies. It had its fun in the sun, but now it (and just about every altcoin) will bleed their values from the layman's wallet while opportunists and whales exploit an already-broken economy. Depending on who you ask (or what chain you trade on) we're already there.

[arcticbull]

> If anything, crypto at least seems to indirectly put food on your table, articbull. I would find it hard to believe you don't get any compensation from religiously covering every HN comment sections about crypto with misinformation.

It's a hobby, I promise :)

> Surely your motives can't simply be the fear of being out of a job if bigtech fades into irrelevance. AI would logically be a way bigger threat to your occupation.

In my role as a critic (or I suspect you'd say cynic) whether crypto succeeds or fails doesn't matter. If it finds a killer use case and makes my life better I win because my life is better. I'll be the first to use any technology that makes my life better, or the things I do faster or cheaper. As I am not invested, it doesn't hurt me if it fails. The stock I own is broadly agnostic to the success or failure of crypto and the idea that any FAANG company is under threat from crypto is silly. If it takes off, the FAANGs would quickly find a way to profit.

> Surely calling 5-25% of many countries' populations criminals (including the US), should be relegated to a fringe extremist view.

They're not using it, they're speculating on its price. That's not the same thing. To use it they'd have to be exchanging it for goods and services and they're simply not because it's a bad store of value and a worse medium of exchange.

The title of that page is "Cryptocurrency Ownership Data" not "Cryptocurrency Use Data."

In re your reply down the line:

> It's as much real world usage, as people owning stocks and precious metals is.

Stocks are productive investments because their appreciation is derived from non-investor participants. Crypto doesn't derive it's value from non-investor participants. Crypto is only re-arranging the wealth in fiat terms, distributing money from later entrants to earlier ones. A better analogy would be to other zero-sum products like options or futures contracts but of course those have use as a hedge against risk which oviously crypto does not as it's simply correlated to the bubble stocks in the NASDAQ.

It is a lot like owning gold (well, except that gold actually is used industrially) but generally owning shiny pebbles has been a fringe sport dominated by William Devane and his 2am coin commercials on Fox. I think gold is a silly investment too and I don't hear anyone selling it as the future of anything.