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> If you know anyone into crypto you would know they talk about it non stop. Not really. There are a lot of people holding, mining, DCA'ing into projects they
by dboat 4y ago
> If you know anyone into crypto you would know they talk about it non stop.
Not really. There are a lot of people holding, mining, DCA'ing into projects they believe in who have no trouble at all keeping it to themselves.
Your remarks about gambling are similarly projecting a portion of the community onto the rest. Those traders who treat it as a speculative asset are gambling as you say, and tend to be obsessive in the way you describe, but you seem not to be aware of everyone who deals with crypto differently than you did.
There are a lot of crypto projects that people don't expect to moon, that effectively serve their purpose right now, and will just get better at it in the future. None of what you wrote is nearly as generally true as you made it out to be.
- 3np 4y agoAt the same time, I assume that most of the liquidity in the markets come from professionals and the people described in GP, whereas the casual retail/investors you describe tend to not keep their assets on orderbooks or in liquidity pools.
- Nav_Panel 4y agoYep, exactly. I've been working in crypto for 4 years and counting, still haven't purchased a single token as an investment. I don't like downside risk, I like to build product. We've weathered one bear market, we'll weather another. Thankfully there's cool stuff in the ecosystem that isn't a scam, but it's not newsworthy, so it doesn't go viral.
- candiddevmike 4y agoCan you give some examples of cool stuff that isn't a scam? I'm genuinely curious.
- Nav_Panel 4y agoOne of the cool parts of crypto is that it enables new forms of social coordination that take place entirely within an online context. We haven't even scratched the surface of what could be possible with DAOs; the UIs and educational materials don't exist yet. But given how online people are in general (and they're only likely to become more online in the future), it's natural they'll want digitally-native ways to organize themselves, represent ownership, qualify membership, etc. The shift in concept required here is from viewing a token as "an investment" to viewing it as a form of legible social proof within its community context, which becomes more meaningful as communities grow beyond the "tipping point" where interpersonal proof (think webs-of-trust) is sufficient for coordination. NFTs (yes, they're still around!) are already serving this function for certain experimental communities (and even in less experimental ones, see POAPs). In general, everything above is still in the experimental, live or die phase. We don't quite know where it's going. But it's pretty damn cool to watch if you're deeply invested in the internet as a medium (and as someone who "grew up online", I absolutely am).
- tkfu 4y agoI'm curious to dig into this a bit more. In general, I'm skeptical about those use cases. * If it's a governance token system where more money == more power...well, I just don't think it's a good idea in general. * If it's a system that tries to replicate the idea of one person/one vote, you have to have KYC (and re-KYC upon membership transfer) or it devolves into the first case. Then the entity doing KYC has centralized control over membership, so it seems like storing membership info on a ledger doesn't offer any benefits compared to just having a central membership database.
- Nav_Panel 4y agoTo address the latter case first: what you gain is standardization and interoperability, where the crypto toolbox acts as a protocol. Even if you're doing KYC in a centralized way, you can plug your token/DAO into any tool that supports it and use their interfaces. At least in theory. Good interfaces don't quite exist yet (it's being worked on). I'm sure there's already web2 tools out there, but the ideal web3 case is far lower friction, requiring no web hosting, deployment, trusted middlemen, etc. The proof of this will be in its success or failure, I'm still not sure how it'll play out. Regarding the former case, of money and power... this one is a little harder. In theory, if you're a part of some community, and a very rich person wanted to fuck up or infiltrate your community by leveraging their wealth, they could probably figure out a way to do it, crypto or not. At least in this case, the existing community members stand to reap some sort of benefit from it, in the sense that a new whale's buy-in will increase the value of their existing holdings. Then they can all cash out and start a new thing someplace else. It has a similar form and moral valence as neighborhood gentrification (but without the racialized element). I tend to think most communities will solve this by having some external aim of coordination that discourages people from just speculating (which makes sense given that social proof exists relative to the community in question), even if the balance of power is determined based on buy-in. But again, I don't really know how it will play out in practice, if more regular people will actually take up these tools for non-speculation reasons, etc.
- tomgp 4y ago
- randomhodler84 4y agoBitcoin is not a scam. Your mileage may vary on other tokens.
- Godel_unicode 4y agoI'm extremely skeptical that this silent majority exists because I don't see crypto being used for anything other than hodl-ing. Do you have indicators you can point to of cryptocurrency being used as a real currency?
- jmcgough 4y agoits only real use cases are in transferring money internationally and buying drugs off the darknet
- gabereiser 4y agoSome big yacht dealers take BTC as well.
- _vdpp 4y agoIt’s not particularly great for that, either. Every transaction is traceable and publicly visible.
- scyclow 4y agoWhether or not you think NFTs are stupid and totally worthless, there's a fairly extensive economy based around fine art NFTs where collectors (who view them more as consumption goods than investments) buy and sell in ETH. And despite wild fluctuations in ETH<>USD, people's mental accounting is generally denominated in ETH.
- Godel_unicode 4y agoI'm unconvinced that most people who buy NFTs are doing it for non-gambling reasons. Where's the market in smart displays you can hook up to your wallet and show you your NFTs? Other than Twitter hexagons, are people doing anything with their NFTs? I have seen very few people talking about the price of something in ETH without a parenthetical giving the current USD value.
- scyclow 4y ago
- paulcole 4y ago> projects they believe in really curious whether what they believe is anything other than “I’ll cash out before it tanks.”