[kkielhofner]

You sound a lot like me.

I ran full nodes, wrote smart contracts, even had 200 GPUs mining ethereum at one point. I still have a bunch of wallets, exchange accounts, ENS names, you name it. Interesting, kind of fun, but then a big "Ok, now what?". Turns out not much other than writing some crypto thing to do another crypto thing that does another crypto thing.

Since getting generally disgusted with the sleaze I saw from the inside I haven't touched any of it in years.

How much difference has this made in my life? Zero (other than not being grossed out on a regular basis). How many times have I had to dust off a wallet or write a smart contract to do something I couldn't do better, faster, and cheaper elsewhere? Zero. How many times have I wanted to buy something and needed crypto? Zero. My experience is an anecdote for the entire space - a lot of time, money, and energy spent with no tangible value and nothing to show for it.

Ethereum is over eight years old, bitcoin nearly 15. ChatGPT has been out for less than a year and I use it on a daily basis to save time and come up with fairly novel things I'm not sure I could on my own. Of course the roots of ChatGPT go back quite far but then again so do merkle trees.

I wish I would have saved the time, money, and grey hairs on crypto for "AI" - I have way more fun with Llama, Whisper, and dozens of other models with immediate and real use cases on a daily basis.

[kubiton]

Indeed. Especially when it's clear that the rich crypto people got rich through others loosing it.

And when you played around with something the next and better version is already around the next corner!

I never seen something like this :)

[emporas]

Cryptography can be used to hide something, or prove something. The word cryptography encapsulates two different disciplines, cryptography and provegraphy. People who use the term crypto-* to refer to blockchain, do not know that blockchain has nothing to do with hiding information, but it has everything to do with proving information.

So the question becomes, what information are you interested on proving to someone on the internet? Say you want to ask an Israeli on Twitter about some bomb stuff and you want to prove you are a reporter. Say you want to prove in a comment on HN, that a repository on github is yours.

However one problem arises. The digital identity or identities, have to be stored somewhere. What happens if there is an outage? OpenAI had a multiple hour outage just today, and an ISP in Australia had a 12 hour outage yesterday. In that case, people cannot prove digitally their identity or identities (hundred of them if they like), even in real life.

The Greek government requires for the digital identity to be proven, access to internet[1]. I was just researching that right now.

Last, Estonia tries to secure the digital identities of their citizens on the blockchain[2]. Why digital identities need to be secured on a blockchain? Just a server or two, in a government building are not enough? How could a globally competitive network of miners, each one holding the digital information independent of any other, be more secure than the one or two servers solution?

[1] https://wallet.gov.gr/ [2] https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/services/legal/tech/assets/estonia...