[onion2k]

Too many smart people work on these pointless projects instead of useful tech that benefits society.

Hindsight is 20/20. In the early days of crypto the promise of decentralized finance outside of the scrutiny of governments and financial institutions was seen as far from pointless. It only went awry when speculators turned up trying to make a profit from an ostensibly useful idea, and they took it so far that the original idea lost all its meaning so the well-meaning folk left.

[jazzyjackson]

Bitcoin was invented with a number go up mechanic, and the idea that a single Bitcoin would be immensely valuable were the currency to gain traction was a point of discussion from the start

Fact is it became popular with speculators faster than it did with anybody else, but the hodlers weren't doing anything to stop people from using it to buy pizza.

[tromp]

The capped emission certainly encourages FOMO and speculation. A fixed block reward would still provide scarcity in the long term while strongly discouraging speculation [1].

[1] https://tromp.github.io/blog/2020/12/20/soft-supply

[rchaud]

Doesn't seem like a hard cap when every BTC is almost infinitely divisible into smaller amounts of "satoshis".

[jazzyjackson]

denominating US money supply in hay pennies does not double the money supply

[tromp]

Enjoy your uncapped supply of food and drinks, with each kg almost infinitely divisible into septillions of molecules.

[Dlemo]

The flaws of crypto were clear very early on.

Major issues, still existing, were never solved

[noosphr]

The surest way to get flamed out of any crypto mailing list was to ask what the effective clearance rate for the coin was, then following it up with how it could be sped up.

Today the bitcoin network is still stuck at ~7 transactions a second.

This is not what the white paper promised.

[dgrr19]

Thus, other blockchains emerged

[noosphr]

Yes, we only need checks notes 3,500 other coins to match the clearance rate of Visa.

[Dlemo]

And adding more confusion and more problems.

Btw. Criss chain transaction is the major problem this strategy added.

[tromp]

requiring much higher resources to run a node and making them much less decentralized.

[dgrr19]

Which one are you referring to? What do you want to get all the freedom in the world and no effort for running a decentralized node? Staking blockchains don't require much resources.

[tromp]

The ones that allow hundreds of txs per second, making verification of the entire tx history orders of magnitude harder. The limited tx throughput of bitcoin is a feature, not a bug.

[Gigachad]

It only highlighted why all these laws and regulations exist in the first place.

[rchaud]

The early promise of crypto is not why Coinbase, Binance, Crypto etc have lots of highly paid, highly skilled employees today. They're there because of the money, the same way electrical engineering grads go to Wall Street in droves.

[Yizahi]

After MtGox the trajectory was pretty clear imo. And when Tethers emerged the whole pyramid was exposed for all to see. It's just pure gambling at this point.