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by tancop 21 days ago
> what crypto will leave behind is bad Austrian economics and worse monkey JPEGs

its what the crypto industry will leave behind, and you could say the main bubble already burst when ftx went bankrupt.

the defining property of public blockchains is they are designed to never go down, and the biggest ones like ethereum probably never will until its replaced by something objectively better. if you take off the scams (aka most of the industry) what youre left with is one of the missing pieces for a real fully decentralized internet.

first off, ethereum is a real alternative to iana and icann. todays open web, atproto and fediverse all depend on dns for name resolution. that system is managed by a single us based corporation thats technically controlled by a non profit but always submits to big tech demands with things like branded tlds and trademark disputes. if you replace that you get a single global authority thats fully transparent and runs on consensus instead of arbitrary decisions.

the other side is anonymous payments. the good thing crypto did in finance is not pumpfun type schemes or centralized stablecoins that run on their issuers word. its systems like railgun or tornado cash (rip) that give you the privacy of cash without risk of counterfeit money or getting set up at a sale. it doesnt matter if its illegal (and some uses of it probably should be illegal like a business doing tax evasion), just that its out there as a fallback in case digital payment systems turn against the public.

crypto is not the world saving end all technology all the scammers want you to believe it is. its way more limited in scope but what it actually gives us is one more tool to get around big tech and oppressive governments. imo thats worth all the damage it caused.

2 comments

I agree that the infrastructure is useful, though not as useful as it said on the tin, and having it around for other purposes is a good thing. I'm not sure it'll persist as "one more tool to get around big tech and oppressive governments."

There's still a lot of work to be done before big tech and governments don't have an outsized influence, even in blockchain-mediated spaces.

Ethereum actually contains a time-bomb designed to make it stop working a few months after the latest protocol revision, which of course can only be published by Vitalik.