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I’ve spent a lot of hours analyzing “crypto” and keeping up with the fads, and to this day I still cannot find a problem that I have, and that it can solve. Bitcoin solves my hard globally-portable savings problem. I don’t see better money than this. And that’s a big problem to solve. Stablecoins solve some developing market intermediate-term money problems in very inflationary environments as a bridging tool while Bitcoin is still volatile. Okay. That’s big for now. Digital collectibles are fine. I mean, I have cardboard Magic the Gathering cards worth thousands of dollars. So you buy an ape NFT and get membership to an exclusive ape club (which is like all dudes, nearly entirely devoid of women) and can show your status by displaying your supposedly elite avatar. I do see how there is a nonzero recurring interest in this sort of digital elitist collectible thing. But it doesn’t solve any of my problems or seem to be relevant on the macro scale. A niche thing that doesn’t appeal to me. Like, Pokémon might make a billion dollars but it won’t make a macro-scale trillion dollars. DeFi is mainly about trading and leveraging worthless tokens. In a world where there are much more real-world tokens involved (eg tokenized Apple stock or whatever), then maybe there is more of a use for that. But until then it’s mainly a circular Ponzi. And even then, that industry is limited. So almost 15 years into this industry, there have been a handful of interesting experiments, but barely anything other than bitcoin and stablecoins interests me at scale. Beyond that, it is just things that they can empower. Nostr, for example, doesn’t need a blockchain. There is no reason to go to the expense to maintain a global state. It certainly is empowered from the fact that Bitcoin and Lightning exist (new good money allows for new good technologies), so it’s a tangential technology. The vast majority of “crypto” projects either don’t solve a problem, or just solve a smaller niche interest.

Replies (20)

It’s very hard to see the value of “crypto” unless you dig deep. Vast majority is enriching VCs, scams, gambling, etc. No way I can explain its potential and what’s going on deeper in a post. As a female monkey pic holder since day after mint, have a very different perspective about the BAYC being devoid of women. While we are underrepresented, now consider so many of them in the club my good friends and we have a strong bond. Lack of women in influential positions is not just a BAYC problem, it’s a societal problem for so many reasons. Would love to discuss further.
↩ replying to stackatoshi
1) Check out Asgardex for Thorchain. They don't censor or blacklist like the Thorswap frontend. github.com/asgardex/asgardex-desktop 2) Unless Bitcoin changes a lot of things on the base layer there are no full replacements for L1 privacy like Monero. Ecash (the only real privacy contender atm) is custodial. Liquid is permissioned. Lightning increasingly grows less and less p2p because of it's nature. And many many other problems I could continue listing that each one has that Monero doesn't.
Dear Alden, I am a great fan of yours and have watched a lot of your podcasts and educational content. I think there is a bigger problem that bitcoin’s block chain will solve than its inherent tokens being a money with better spacial and temporal properties. Humanity still have to depend on a central authority with monopoly on violence to exercise its private property rights. With the advent of immutable time stamping on deeds and similar ownership documents using todays version of available technology called NFT’s or ordinal’s on the bitcoin blockchain, humanity will be able to circumvent the need for that centralized authority in the future. Once immutability of the bitcoin network is well ingrained in the society, hierarchy of ownership to the present, of any property inscribed on the bitcoins blockchain will only be just a click away, and all monopolies of violence can be once and for all eliminated for the good. Hope we all will live to see that day.
There's a subset of people who love Ponzi/pyramid schemes, who are aware they are scams but entertain the notion they can be one of the few winners. It's a form of gambling, to find or create the next coin early, and time their trading. Innovation in scams includes affinity with open source projects, startups, and celebrities, as ways to convince suckers to invest. The goverment has been slow, but is beginning to police the scams. I believe gov also loves the idea of confusing people into lumping Bitcoin in with scams with the term Crypto, all while they go after Crypto, to slow Bitcoin adoption since they can't ban it. In this sense Crypto is an attack on Bitcoin. Ironically scams are also an instance of the exact target market of Bitcoin, by being censorship resistant global money, it enables anyone to start and join a new scam without permission. Bitcoin simultaneously gives rise to, and is attacked by Crypto, yet the signal remains: the cumulative work performed by mining, and the price charts, to anyone who ignores the noise of marketing and trolls.
It's a good thing you put "crypto" in quotes, to alert me to look for the intended meaning. You apparently meant "blockchains". For me, "crypto" means the array of symmetric, public key, and hash algorithms that are classified by the US as "munitions" (and thus subject to 2nd amendment protection). These enable signing documents, encrypting documents to a specific pubkey, computing a unique secure handle for a document (ipfs, and other schemes that use hashes in links), authentication without shared secrets (aka passwords), etc, etc Email, usenet, and other social media developed in the 80s - but it was unauthenticated. It was trivial to spoof a usenet article as a joke. Email was flexible enough to incorporate various forms of authentication as an add-on. (Ironically, the original authentication of HELO is often misconfigured and rarely checked.) New protocols incorporate authentication as a MUST and various privacy features as options. So, in my view, the #1 problem crypto solves is authentication. #2 problem is privacy.