… the founding ideas are promising, and something I dream of.
Before I start, just a little bit of background on me so you can understand how biased I am (😅): I’m a 16 years old programmer and I won a few crypto hackathon/funding rounds and I made a lot of friends in the field. It allowed me to get quite a bit of ETH/XMR along the way!
I see cryptocurrencies getting a lot of hate, rightly so for the number of scams, shitcoins, NFTs bullshit, “governance”, DAOs and all those often useless & snob terms.
However the founding ideas of decentralisation and freedom with your money are very appealing to me. Smart contracts are really interesting for creating your own banking operation and tokens can represent anything! It’s a world of possibilities to play with, and you get to build something useful for people!
I’d just like to add a bit of nuance tho: I see a lot of apps being built and what’s really making me laugh is the lack of open-source, decentralisation and auditing on privacy. Granted, there is a lot of fake promises, but it’s like everything, you have to find the talented people to follow.
I find it fascinating to build unstoppable, decentralised, user-first apps. I just hope that web3 stays true to its founding principles.
Hope it was interesting, tell me what you think!
EDIT: title+typos+the game is not comfortably played in Act 2
For a start, bitcoin is revolutionary. It solves all the problems with the banking system.
For example, people’s card details get stolen all the time. Bitcoin had solved this by using a new public key for each transaction.
When something is purchased using a credit/debit card, you are effectively using the same public key for every transaction. So what is happening is replay attacks. This type of scam is inevitable because the banking system is insecure by nature. It’s built on a foundation of insecurity.
Bitcoin fixes all that. Bitcoin or similar is necessary for money-based economies to continue to work in the future.
Bitcoin and crypto are more than this. This is just one of the important innovations bitcoin makes.
Sorry but your examples of the problems are pretty minor and solvable by other means (you can’t do much with my credit card details because they require strong authentication which uses one-time passwords). Also, you conveniently leave out all the problems with cryptocurrency. It’s not like you’re protected in any way. We also do not have any adopted implementation of cryptocurrency that’s not slow and super wasteful of resources. So far they’ve also had the ponzi-scheme problem… first adopters can become very rich but late-comers get crumbs or lose everything.
You make a lot of points. To explain all of those things, I would news to make a very long post. i think i will do that when i get time.
I think it’s so exciting because those blockchains solve a lot of problems and are a land of possibility.
Yes block chains predate bitcoin and are very useful. Git uses them. A currency is a perfect use case for a block chain. You need to robustly store balances and transactions so they can’t be tampered with.
I would say it’s insane to have a currency which is not block chain based. Too easy to fiddle your finances.