alt Hacker NewsTwo things can be true at the same time:
- Bitcoin was and is a massive, historic accomplishment in creating digital scarcity for the first time and the long term effects are still playing out.
- Virtually all of the "crypto" or Bitcoin 2.0 schemes in the 15 years since have been scams. Essentially a way for a tech founder to mint tokens out of thin air, and then try to convince others to treat them as money so he can get a huge (fiat-denominated) exit. Stablecoins are basically the only crypto innovation of note that have achieved PMF.
Don't confuse the former for the latter!
Replies
> creating digital scarcity
yay?
Why is artificially creating digital scarcity, something that isn't actually difficult, an achievement?
Scarcity is not a virtue.
>massive, historic accomplishment in creating digital scarcity
accomplishment? like, something big and good?
The first thing is false or worded poorly. Before Bitcoin became globally popular, there were many examples of digital scarcity driving significant transaction volume: Early online games with tradeable game objects, gimmicks like Million Dollar Homepage, etc.
Valve hired economist and future politician Yanis Varoufakis in 2012, when Bitcoin was well below $1000, to study "in-game economies" (i.e. digital scarcity) because it was such a big deal in their existing online games.
You are forgetting Ethereum which is the defacto main standard and driver in the "crypto industry". Most of those chains are in fact EVM based (so outside of Bitcoin, XRP or Solana).
The people in and around the Ethereum Foundation are solving very interesting problems but nobody talk about it on HN. For example I believe they are at the forefront of the use zero-knowledge proofs.
Just dig into [0].
Is the Ethereum Foundation and broader project dedicated to pumping the cryptocurrency ETH? obviously not and they are not by far the top holder of it.
The fact that the crypto is not providing real returns is actually one of the main criticism of the project.
of course you would include bitcoin in the latter, too, right? Right?
Though, there’s a part of me thinking that the basic idea of creating artificial scarcity for profit is hard to separate from scamminess. It’s giving De Beers.