I'm gonna go out on a limb here and claim that the general interest in
cryptocurrencies is directly proportional to the BTC/USD rate.
Remember the 2018 bubble, when everyone made delusional claims along the lines of the blockchain will replace the internet? It got so big that even a bunch of companies bought the hype. Cash was thrown at business projects that made no goddamn sense: I distinctly remember asking the Finnish MD of a major financial organization how their blockchain proof-of-concept was supposed to work. They managed to convince me they didn't have a clue.
At 2021, we're witnessing another crazy bull run. This time around your local
NFT snake oil salesman is namedropping web3 and digital scarcity, but it's
really the same old stuff. Let 1BTC = 1ETH = 0USD and, I assure you that DeFi,
DAOs and meme tokens disappear from the Forbes back to the fringes.
The obsession with the BTC/USD rate reveals how empty the hype is: There
simply is nothing else to be interested in. Nobody cared about the tech
then, nobody really cares about
the tech now.
Yeah, Bitcoin achieves a distributed consensus between unreliable actors. That's a tricky problem and the solution is pretty genius. For a lot of people, it's just not that relevant: If you can trust your government and your banks to a reasonable degree, it's much simpler to run things the centralized way.
Yeah you can run distributed apps on Ethereum. Why do that though?
There is an enormous influx of technologically illiterate people who aren't even
pretending they are after anything other than a quick buck. I try to watch TV
and I see Matt Damon on a crypto ad suggesting that trading dogecoin is about as
groundbreaking as being the first person on Mars. Oh, by the way, even though
climate change is a very real existential threat for our species, we are spending
a country's worth of electricity on meaningless SHA-256s, because we're too
greedy to quit.
It's all so messed up and I just miss simpler times.
Burn It With Fire!
Nicholas Weaver and Stephen Diehl have already said almost everything there is to say, but I have one thing to add…
One new infuriating thing is all the greenwashing. “But OUR blockchain is carbon negative!” because they use proof of
steakstake and buy carbon credits or whatever. Questions of PoS security and whether these projects are even decentralized aside, the BIG question is – isn’t it absolutely ridiculous to view one cryptocurrency in isolation? The monetary value of whatever “green” coin is based on exchange! Exchange with BTC and other titans, as well as fraudulent “stablecoins”. It’s all derived from the BTC/USD “rocket”! Without it the value of your greenwhatevercoin would be $0.000000001. We have to always look at the buttcoin economy as a whole, and as a whole it is the opposite of green.