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.
@mapehe I feel exactly the same, and I know a number of software engineers who feel the same too, despite being far from luddites: the tech is backwards, the speculative mania is ridiculous, a lot of people will lose money gambling, and proof-of-work contributes to destroying the planet. Except, I don't miss "simpler times", whatever that means. Sure, cryptobros shilling stupid tokens and parroting the same hackneyed propaganda are a cancer, but following the endless litany of scams and ridiculous fails littering this absurd speculative bubble is an inexhaustible source of dark humor for me.
To me, cryptocurrencies and NFTs are really the product of our times, at the intersection of cargo-cult of buzzword-filled innovation, startup-style technological solutionnism, bubble-prone economic environment, desperation of younger people in the current western economy, uncontrollable diffusion of fake news, development of the alt-right movement, and growing defiance towards institutions. There is something deeply wrong about them which mirrors something deeply wrong about our society.
Cryptobros like to invoke decentralization as a miracle cure for any problem. They basically pretend technology can fix social problems just by removing centralized governance, which is at best a very immature belief, at worst a ploy to put them in charge. Stephen Diehl calls it decentralized woo. I wouldn't mind if the Web3 crowd didn't steal the "decentralized" word from actual Internet re-decentralization initiatives like the Fediverse to change its meaning to "built on an inefficient blockchain-powered anarcho-capitalist speculative marketplace".