| HN Mirror

>> punk as f*ck

> Those Sand Hill Road VC investments were definitely punk.

I remember fondly the very early years of bitcoins, when it was worth nothing. I was probably too naïve at the time and didn't see the libertarian agenda of a lot of people, but it really did seem like a lot of the community was made of cryptopunks, excited with this idea of a cryptographic distributed virtual currency. Something that felt like it came straight out of a sci-fi novel. At the time, I think a lot of people (including me) thought that it could maybe help people in authoritarian country, make international transfer cheaper and faster, and digitize banks which felt so behind (I remember having to still call my bank on the phone to be able to do a lot of operations).

This sadly very promptly disappeared. It should have been obvious that a lot of rule surrounding banking where there for a reason. Cryptocurrencies became widely used (and recognized) for its criminal usage, facilitating ransomware, scams, money laundering, financing terrorism and other criminal network. Sure it was fun, and innocent enough, to be able to buy a bag of weed "anonymously" from the dark web, but sadly a lot of usage was darker than that. Authoritarian country, and again it should have been obvious, didn't have much trouble regulating their usage to a point that it couldn't be safely used in a amount that was not insignifiant. But most just didn't care because it didn't actually changed anything for them. And then years and years of development, but no significant progress seemed to be made. Transaction where impossible to scale and became massively expensive and the fundamental flaw of the technology seems to be insurmontable. Ethereum came with a nice promise also, the idea of a global decentralized machine. Program that could be run "on-the-chain" and enforced contract, promising to get rid of the need of a third party. But it also became obvious that it had all the disadvantage of having no third party and none of the advantage.

The crypto community also manage to prove to a massive extent the usefulness of regulation. There was a time where every day there were multiple new cryptocurrency with a nice shiny website, a white paper full of buzzword and not much else, promising a ICO in a few days. Then once the whole pump and dump was done, it vanished from existence. Over and over again. At some point ICO where replaced by NFT. Different name, same result. After the hype (a.k.a the marketing period), you were left with a useless and worthless digital token, and the only way to get rid of it was trying hard to convince other that it was worth anything.

Although I have to say, "fake it until you make it really" seems to be a core value of any crypto-enthusiate. Despite still having no actual usefulness, outside of being a vehicule for financial speculation, so much money was dumped into the whole ecosystem that it still look like a legitimate business. Crypto.com is (was?) a prime sponsor of F1, BtcTurk had advertisement plastered all over the newly built Atatürk Airport, NFT were "brought" by very famous people, ... And in many way it was successful enough to keep attracting investment, from very serious business-suit wearing people. Will they learn from FTX ? Why would they ? They didn't learn from Mt. Gox, Theter, Ripple, the many fraudulent ICO, the obvious pump and dump. If anything, everyone turns a blind eye because at this point, you either avoid crypto like the plague, you are part of the scam, or you are the one getting scammed.

I really miss those days where it seems like a sci-fi tech. In many ways, I still want to believe, but cryptocurrencies where born on a flawed premise. They are dead, they were always dead and they will remained dead.