Anyway I'd want to respond to multiple posters but there's too many topics to cover. Point is, I just don't see the long running vitality in cryptocurrency. There's utility in blockchain cryptosecurity in some more limited use cases, but cryptocurrency itself feels like a desperate push to monetize and capitalize on the expansion the applicability of this tech innovation for something that is ultimately not needed.
It'd be going to far to say the solutions crypto aims to present are for problems that don't exist, but the current Web3 dream of unregulated and indiscriminate financial freedom and equality is rendered futile by 1) the heaviest hitters in the market manipulating said market being the most affluent of the already established global financial institution 2) fraudsters and criminals who scam people left and right and have ostensibly ruined the NFT market (among other factors, including market oversaturation, rug pull or half assed projects, and low use case utility across the board) 3) the toxic positivity of crypto evangelists on a daily overdose of hopium who keep espousing said web3 utopia and how crypto will go to the moon while simultaneously shutting down even the slightest hint of criticism or concerns and dismissing/disregarding anything that isn't blind and total positivity as "FUD" even in light of a market that is really struggling right now. You don't have to look farther than this thread to find an example of that.
And for what? We're told that crypto is supposed to present financial independence and unencumbered opportunities to attain wealth and financial security while simultaneously being told that the early adopters were the smart ones for getting in early. They weren't smart, they were obscenely wealthy. And even if that's true, that means there's a significant roadblock to ordinary people making meaningful gains now. Oh no but wait, crypto is still increasing and will recover. It's not volatile, you can still be smart and get in now before prices skyrocket again! Forget that as soon as real world market trends indicated that their might be a global recession, crypto value tanked across the board.
And that's because, as discussed in this thread, things like stocks are based on tangible market factors. What is crypto based on? Hype and the promise of Web3 application functionality. And because my girlfriend has done art for NFT projects I've spent the better part of the past year around crypto people so I'm always asking them to explain that element to me. I get 1 of two general answers: Either they don't know anything about what Web3 will actually look like and they go off on diatribes about how advancements in technology are always hard to imagine or conceive until the most innovative of us actually develops something, or the Web3 use cases I hear are almost always for niche technical applications that most ordinary people would never be interested in and they generally have de minimis/niche utility in serving corporate needs. I have a friend couple that are really just wonderful people but they're tech people and they're investing their entire future in creating their own metaverse. And this is just a husband and wife living less than ten minutes away from me. They're not the only ones. As it stands the flagship metaverse, Facebook's "Meta" is significantly failing to convince ordinary people that there's much of a point in getting involved and using it. Imagine when every independent tech dev in the world tries to put out their own metaverse at the same time and no one is in them.
And this is where it gets into solutions for problems, that maybe do exist but they're not significant enough to warrant unwavering faith in crypto for its tenuous potential for solving those problems. Especially not at the expense of our environment. I'm not going to direct quote back to that discussion, but it's not a question of how clean one coin is versus another. It's a question of how the totality of cryptomining is having a measurably negative environmental impact for something that we don't need. Traditional manufacturing is harmful to the environment too and our species has to figure out a way to mass produce necessary products in a cleaner way if we want to survive, but at least most manufacturing is for things people need or at the very least can use for something. Crypto is only adding fuel to the wildfire on a product that we can all live just fine without. It hasn't created anything new and it hasn't presented as an optimal replacement for anything that already exists other than methodology for money laundering.
Crypto, in my view, just seeks to create a tech based world replete with benefits and use case applications that ordinary people just don't need and many that they would get little to no utility out of. And it's backed by the wealthy seeking to get wealthier, criminals looking to exploit people, tech devs looking for alternative ways to earn a living, and cryptobros who are so invested in this alternative financial space that they make the majority of their personality and motivation this dedication to hyping up crypto at every turn to do their part to foster the development and growth of their investments while defiantly ignoring every struggle the market faces, or any criticism or concern regarding its longterm vitality.
Like I said, I was pretty skeptical going into it, and more than a year of watching how this space operates, I don't see it as anything more than downright silly and to the extent that it speeds up the destruction of our environment, dangerous. f*** crypto.
gizmodo.com
