[api]

The last part is a valid point, but it’s also part of what I don’t like about crypto.

You have this very technical protocol that lets you do banking without banks and theoretically without central banks. I always thought that was cool. But then you release it. A few aficionados use it, but most people can’t because it’s as you say highly technical and opinionated.

So along come people who try to do the usual tech thing of bringing it to the masses. They don’t care one bit about the libertarian political stuff. They don’t truly care how the technology really works. They’re looking to build a product.

So they do, and they release it, and it eventually finds product market fit: gambling and scamming. Note that this is also what most non-finance peolle do with direct access to stock markets and fiat currency markets too. It’s not something inherent to crypto. People love to gamble and scam.

Unfortunately this application and the number of people and amount of money involved in it totally swamps and dwarfs the original idealistic libertarian types. Crypto becomes about scams and gambling. This is how you get to 99% of all projects being scams or casinos.

It’s similar to how all of social media became about surveillance and propaganda supercharged by interfaces designed for addiction.

Now people hate crypto for the same reason they hate social media.

It’s tempting to wring your hands and just blame the unwashed masses for corrupting the fire you brought down the mountain, and that’s not entirely wrong. Yet I for one am not content with just doing that and being a curmudgeon.

Instead I like to think about how technologies can be designed from the ground up to incentivize positive uses.

Crypto has a lot of characteristics for example that incentivize or at least make it very attractive for stupid and destructive uses. The irreversible transactions are great for scams, and the highly deflationary economics are great for speculative casinos.

[loveparade]

I totally agree with this take. I like to describe Ethereum as a "platform for scams" because its by far biggest use case are scams. Scams are just so easy when you have money built-in at the base layer. Just imagine a world where decades ago SMTP had launched with built-in payments. Leaving aside that adoption would've been impossible during that time because people are scared of putting their credit card info online, it likely would've resulted in SMTP to fail and being used almost exclusively for scams since it would've been so easy to extract money from people via email. Crypto has that problem.

That doesn't make SMTP (or Ethereum) itself a scam. But it's also undeniable that a platform for scams doesn't have a positive impact on the world.