| The shady nature of what often goes on in crypto has a lot more to do with human nature than the technology of trustless distributed ledgers. It's still a wild west out there, and we weren't exactly model citizens during the literal wild west either. It wasn't tamed by people altruistically agreeing to stop robbing each other with their powerful gun technology, but by laws and law enforcement; crypto needs the same, and then we can hopefully eventually enjoy the benefits of the technology, freeing us from the iron grip of ancient scumlords like Visa, MasterCard, PayPal etc. There's no fundamental law that says a technology must be abused, that's human choice. (BTW another choice is Bitcoin choosing to stay with extremely wasteful proof of work consensus mechanism, when proof of stake by all indications seems to work too. Again that's not something fundamentally flawed with crypto in general, that's people making greedy decisions because they're balls deep invested in Bitcoin in particular. Right now it's the top dog, but we should hope it won't always be like that if they continue to grossly misuse energy by choice with viable alternatives.) I find it extremely disappointing how even the HN crowd struggle to distinguish ubiquitous human greed from the problem crypto solves and its potential uses. Just because crypto hasn't broken down your door and forced you to get some benefit from it doesn't mean it's intrinsically useless; if we all ate with chopsticks and knives were mainly known for use in stabbings, it doesn't logically follow that knives are fundamentally a weapon. Give it time and law enforcement, maybe that knife can be good for something else one day. |