Yes, I know that it still exist, and yes, decentralized currency which utilizes distributed, cryptographic validation is not actually a strictly bad idea, but…

Is the speculative investment scam, which crypto substantially represented, finally dead? Can we go back to buying gold bars and Pokemon cards?

I feel like it is, but I’m having a hard time putting my finger on why it lost its sheen. Maybe crypto scammers moved on to selling LLM “prompts?” Maybe the rug just got pulled enough times that everyone lost trust.

  • I’m a fan of cryptocurrencies, and I would dearly love for the “speculative investment scam” aspect of it to be dead. It’s been a massive drag on the technology’s reputation for many years, preventing it from being used for all kinds of applications that would really benefit from some form of cryptocurrency integration. Unfortunately even if the “speculative investment scam” aspect dies the bad reputation will linger, so hopefully those applications will find ways to sneak it in where useful without drawing too much attention.

    •  s_s   ( @s_s@lemmy.one ) 
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      It’s been 13 years and the only applications found have been in fraud.

      Over and over, blockchain is a solution to a question nobody asked.

      You might as well say you’re a biplane enthusiast or something.

      • Hey. Biplanes are actually much more relevant in today’s world than crypto. They aren’t common, but there are still new biplanes made because they are a valid solution for certain problems. Unlike blockchain.

        • I’m not actually interested in the value of the tokens, I only own a few tens of dollars’ worth myself. I’m interested in the application-related aspects of it.

          For example, something applicable to the Fediverse that comes to mind is the Ethereum Name System. That’s a blockchain-based mechanism that allows for DNS-like “domain names” to be claimed by users. Something like it could serve as a way of registering a username for the Fediverse and then having it be completely portable between instances without the need to rely on any centralized authentication provider. Since they do cost a small amount of actual money to register they’d make for a good spam prevention method - a regular user only needs to register a name every once in a rare while, but a spammer needs to register a new one each time their existing name gets blocked. It’d get expensive real fast for a spammer.

          Unfortunately this adds some complication to the registration process that the Fediverse really can’t afford right now. And worse, it has the dreaded “NFT” label hanging around its neck because technically a username registration is indeed an NFT if you want to categorize it like that. So I can only sigh and watch a perfectly useful technology go unused due to the bad name it’s been given.

          Oh well. Someday the usefulness will overcome the perception.

          • Tons of people already can’t handle signing up for a simple account. You think having to get a crypto wallet, figure out how to use it, and pay money into it before you can even start actually signing up for a social media account is ever gonna fly? Not in a million years.

            NFTs truly are the best imaginable example of a solution in search of a problem. Every single use case I’ve ever heard someone pitch is something that already exists and already works. But like… what if your hotel key was an NFT, bro? Whoa. What if your softball team’s schedule was an NFT? What if your social media account was an NFT? 🤯

            • I explicitly said in my comment:

              Unfortunately this adds some complication to the registration process that the Fediverse really can’t afford right now.

              You don’t appear to have actually read it all the way through, just triggered a standard anti-NFT rant off of the fact that the word “NFT” was present in it. Which is ironically exactly the problem I was complaining about.

              • I read it. And I disagree.

                It isn’t that it can’t handle it “right now.” It will never handle it. Nobody wants it.

                But I bet “you can’t read, you’re just triggered by a word” is way easier to fantasize about than actually paying attention to reality.

          • Have you heard of hashcash, it’s POW precursor to bitcoin. It stops spam, was originally developed for email but could be incorporated into Lemmy eventually on sign up. Principal is similar to what you suggest.

    • Technology rarely advances for reasons that benefit the majority. It advances to make a few people rich, kill people very efficiently, or to increase profit margins on porn sales (see item 1, I guess).

      If you think about the really good applications of things like crypto, NFTs, blockchain, etc., you quickly realize that they are things that aren’t marketable or profitable for the entities that would need to implement them. If all the banks and credit companies bought into something like blockchain or NFTs, then transaction fraud and identity theft would disappear overnight… but what would THEY get out of it? The only way it’s ever going to happen is with coordinated government mandates, and nobody running for office has the faintest idea of what crypto tech is other than “dumb way for the nouveau riche to waste their money”

      • I don’t think transaction fraud or identity theft would disappear overnight, they would just take on different forms.

        I think a big part of why cryptocurrencies don’t take off as actual currencies (beyond speculative investors ruining everything), is the fact that there are a lot of clear benefits to a centralized system that blockchains have yet to adequately replace.

        1: Scale. The amount of processing power it would require to process all McDonald’s daily credit card transactions on a blockchain is many orders of magnitude greater than that of using Visa or Mastercard. Even when you account for proof-of-stake coins like Ethereum. Maintaining a single large centralized database will always be more energy efficient than maintaining many large decentralized databases, especially when the latter comes wrapped in a dozen layers of cryptography.

        2: Reversibility. If I buy something from a stranger on the internet and use my debit or credit card, my bank can issue a chargeback if said stranger tries to screw me over. This is fundamentally impossible on a blockchain without relying on some kind of middleman to hold funds in escrow, at which point you’re basically back to using big centralized banks to do all the heavy lifting. Sellers may view this as a positive aspect of using a blockchain, but they can’t realistically force buyers to use a payment processor more amenable to their desires. If they could, PayPal would have vanished years ago.

        On top of that, one of the big problems that blockchain solves can be solved through centralized systems as well. The big one that people bring up is credit card fraud, but what a lot of people don’t realize is that credit card fraud is a lot less common outside the US than within. This is because places like the EU have mandated security measures such as chip-and-pin (the US only requires the chip part). Smartphone-based contactless payment systems like Apple Pay also provide effective 2-factor authentication at the point of sale. And while blockchain is theoretically more secure, in practice these mechanisms are “good enough” for everyday use.

      • How does crypto stop identity theft or transaction fraud? Crypto does nothing for credit, which is basically what identity theft is, and if you’re missing how widely there’s transaction fraud on crypto you haven’t been paying attention.

        • It’s not the cryptocurrency itself that prevents fraud, it’s the surrounding technologies such as blockchains and NFTs.

          Using NFT to own the address to a PNG is hilariously stupid and worthless, but what it’s actually great for is receipts. If I buy a donut and get an NFT proving that I now own the donut (along with metadata about where and when I purchased the donut) and months later I am on trial for murder, I can prove to the court with absolute mathematical certainty that I couldn’t have killed anyone at that time because I was eating a donut halfway across town.

          Using blockchain similarly is great for proving your transaction history. Maybe I somehow faked that NFT about the donut? Well, I couldn’t have, because it was months ago and blockchain history is cryptographically impossible to spoof.

          These are obviously contrived examples, but when applied at scale it becomes an extremely powerful way to verify truth. Yes, I did in fact buy those tickets, here’s my NFT, now let me on the plane. No, I did not spend $3000 on knock-off accessories, here is my blockchain. The odds of someone being able to fake these is extremely low.

          But, again, this will never come into practice, at least not in the near future. As @beefcat pointed out, implementing these systems would be expensive for the established financial institutions, and would present new challenges for them to create new processes for handling. An awful lot of work to create something that is stronger and safer when there is little motivation for them to do so.

          • I don’t know, this sounds a lot like DNA evidence. Sounds great in theory, but doesn’t actually mean what TV implies it to mean. In terms of a receipt, you still need to tie that to a person, or the wallet to the person. Given how easily people have lost their wallets, it’ll be a similar issue to “My credit card was used at that time”. Yes, the wallet / CC was used at a place at a time, but who was the person using it? In either case, they’ll want to use the security video or clerk witness testimony to tie it together.

            I’m not even sure what situation you’re thinking that the airline would not accept their own printed ticket or shot of the ticket PDF or whatever they send you today, but the NFT would make all the difference. Again, either the Airline system reads your ticket data, whether it’s NFT, barcode, or traditional digital and can tie it to a sale in their system or they can’t. They can lose the NFT link just as well as the barcode link, and the gate agent isn’t going to understand or care that you have an NFT that cryptographically proves “blah blah blah”. They’re already checking ID. For someone to fake the barcode version, they would also need a fake ID or Passport to match it.

            I sort of see what you’re saying if you went to court, and the airline wouldn’t do discovery or purposefully shredded their records of your ticket for some reason, but we already have receipts and bank statements and the like that do the same thing, and an NFT doesn’t change needing to prove you bought it in this case, presumably via linking a wallet rather than a bank account, though wallets don’t have the ID requirements bank accounts do, so in court that could actually be rather harder to do.

            • Looking at each piece in isolation it’s hard to see the real world value. You have to put it all together. Let’s do the airline ticket example.

              Real world today, the information involved in purchasing a ticket is controlled by three parties: The customer, the airline, and the financial institute (assuming you didn’t walk up and pay cash). Anybody involved here screw up or be malicious. You lost your ticket. The airline had a database malfunction. The bank/creditor improperly recorded the transaction. All parties are aware of these potential failures, so there are contingencies in place in case of a missing ticket, a ticket that can’t be found the system, a bad or missing financial transaction. But these backup plans also open the door to fraud, so there need to be even more plans on top of the backups: How to verify the integrity of a seemingly real ticket, protocol for re-verifying a financial event, etc.

              It’s simple because it’s familiar, but it’s really ridiculously complicated and error prone.

              Let’s introduce NFTs and blockchain.
              You buy the airline ticket and the following things happen:
              The bank performs the transaction and records it to the blockchain, which is decentralized and owned by no one, so it is verified by all parties before anything else happens. Bank errors are now impossible.
              You and the airline perform a mutual authentication, which generates an NFT proving existence of the ticket and attaches it to your identity. From your perspective, this would be unlocking your phone and clicking “approve.”

              Now you approach the airport kiosk and there’s a problem.
              Airline has no record of purchase - well, the blockchain does, so it’s their fuck up and they have no reasonable argument. You win.
              Airline can’t match your ticket to their database - You show them your NFTicket, which their system verifies is a valid, unspoofable, immutable ticket for what you say it is. Again, it’s their fuck up and they have no reasonable argument. You win.
              Conversely, you say you have a ticket for today, they say it’s for tomorrow. You inspect the ticket, it is in fact for tomorrow. You fucked up, no further argument.

              The only way any of this goes wrong is one of the following:
              Multiple forms of your identification are stolen - phone, password, biometrics. Obviously a lot harder than nabbing a CC number.
              Multiple parties lose their records at the same time. Possible but unlikely.
              State-level villains sabotage the entire system. Possible, sure, but this is an apocalypse-level event and probably an act of war.

              It’s effectively impossible for someone to steal or fake a ticket or transaction in this system, and because of that, anybody who has receipts is automatically proven right and you don’t need to jump through any more hoops or threaten to sue anybody. It’s complex behind the scenes but it makes life for businesses and consumers braindead simple. There are so many layers of trust in action that no individual party can reasonably claim something did or did not happen just because THEY messed up.

              • You’re talking like this happens all the time though, or specifically the airline loses your ticket record. I can’t even think of a bank error that would somehow be involved in a way that this helps you really - banks have every incentive to be as close as humanly possible to perfect in their record keeping, because when they aren’t, they get sued, they get slapped with fines from the government, and they lose customers. The entire sales pitch of a bank is trust.

                But what really seems to be happening here is you’re suggesting that someone has both lost their ticket, and the airline at the same time lost their record of the ticket. This is exactly the same as

                Multiple parties lose their records at the same time. Possible but unlikely.

                You can stand there with your NFT all you want, the airline can still say - we don’t recognize it as valid due to a screwup in their system, same as they do with a CC receipt or a printed ticket I guess. They can and do bump people from flights they agree have valid tickets all the time. And now you’re back to what? Complaining to customer service or suing them (cause you can’t force a bank to get back your crypto from the airline like you can dispute a CC charge).

                Maybe you’re right and it’s ticket forgery that this would prevent, but I really question if that’s a big driver here of any issues for anyone.

            • I don’t see why a distributed blockchain is actually necessary to solve this problem though. Basic public-key cryptography is enough to sign and validate documents like real estate titles, without all the overhead incurred by NFTs. Our problem is that we aren’t even making effective use of technology we’ve already had for decades to solve this.

      • P2P is the new hotness
      • LAMP is the new hotness
      • Ruby on Rails is the new hotness
      • Big data is the new hotness
      • Machine Learning is the new hotness
      • Crypto is the new hotness
      • AI is the net hotness

      None of these died, none of them were the new hotness for very long. Oh by the by, our company is looking for anyone with fifteen years experience in ChatGPT (/s). But in all serious, there’s always a very vocal group that’s chasing the hype. No idea how big they truly are, but they sure do bang the gong the entire time.

    • I find this one hilarious as I tend to add techs to my portfolio as they begin to break mainstream. Bascially I build what my customers want.

      last year they wanted blockchain games, now they are asking for AI. Some want AI Blockchain games, some want Blockchain AI games. Others, like influencers, just want you to build whatever they think will get conversions.

  •  swnt   ( @swnt@feddit.de ) 
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    331 year ago

    but I’m having a hard time putting my finger on why it lost its sheen.

    One aspect might be, that the scam stories are much more popular and easier to circulate on social media than are actual usages. It’s a strong online virality bias. Scams and phishing also happen a lot in fiat and cash (albeit relatively lower), but since most of it is so secret and banks really don’t want to get bad media, then try to keep such things hidden.

    Look at Monero (privacy coin) for example. There is no news on whales, scams etc. there, because it’s private so there is no attention given to that. That makes is easier to simply use it and not get an overly negative news bias.

    At the same time, cryptos were successfully used during Ukraine for quick money Donations. This was also reported in news, but it doesn’t stick so long into the minds of the people as the controversial scams/ftx etc.

    Finally, at least with Ethereum there is still around 10 years of development in front of it with exciting new capabilities. Until a few years from now, we’ll finally have a system with scalability ans high security as well.

    However, until then ethereum will grow slowly.

    Also, unfortunately I think the focus of many people has shifted from p2p currency and adoption to money making and investment - which isn’t too bad, but adoption still sucks and makes it less useful for now.

  • It mainly lost it appeal as crashes, arrests, lawsuits, and thief keep happeneding. It was shown to be scammy with scammers scamming.

    And yeah the new hotness of LLMs also helped. The tech bros who use to be pushing “X but with crypto” are now looking to push “X but with AI”.

    • yes, everyone likes to talk that USD/EUR is risky, you have inflation, you have banks closing and stock market crashing, but so far it seems crypto is much much riskier. I feel much safer having my money in bank than having it on some blockchain, accessible only if I know private key and if I loose it there is 0 change I will ever see any of my money.

  • Well, the irony is hard to miss, right? Crypto was born out of this grand idea of decentralization, but then everyone just rushed over to these centralized exchanges. Kinda sounds like a death knell to me. Seems like the original spirit of crypto got lost in the rush for profits.

    I do think the tech and the concept will keep evolving, and eventually, it’ll morph into something new, get a new name or something. Here’s hoping that when it does, people will get that it’s better to trust the collective ‘us’ instead of just a select few. After all, these are often the same folks messing things up. But, what can you do, huh?

  • A lot of controversial comments. Here are some of my observations:

    • Not a single mention of decentralised finance/DeFi in the comments, which is a game-changer.
    • A lot of outdated information or misunderstanding of recent developments in the industry
    • A large focus on scams and crypto bros, who are the loudest but definitely not the majority
      • DeFi has added some real value for both project creators and users, not just for myself. I’m not talking about the ‘money making, profit driven’ side of value either, but utility, capital efficiency, flexibility, new financial primitives as well.

        All sorts of crazy innovation that you shouldn’t just hand-wave away as a scam or redundant.

    •  fades   ( @fades@beehaw.org ) 
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      Good points for sure.

      You mentioned recent developments, what Loopring is doing with Layer 2/3 technology has been game changing within the ethereum space. GameStop’s NFT marketplace, especially the games shines because of it.

      Semi-related, this post reminds me of a recent F1 story I came across on squabbles, where they are using w3 improve their ticketing systems to combat certain things that currently cause issues like scalping while also providing a medium for tailored ticket and fan experiences. It has actually been a long time coming, I found this article from ‘21 How Non-Fungible Tokens Are Coming To F1 which goes more in-depth with what their vision is and what they believe they can achieve.

      I wouldn’t be surprised if these kinds of applications pop up in other sports down the road if it does well for F1.

      Given all the negative press in addition to the unfortunate support from GOP fascists, from the outside looking in it must seem like it’s 90% delusional morons being taken advantage of by 10% scammer assholes.

      There are delusional morons and scammer assholes, but it’s a loud minority and does not define the technology and the assoc industry.

      • I tried to like Loopring, but their L2s were hardcoded circuits rather than zkEVM which the Polygon and Matterlabs team (and Starkware to a lesser extent) are pushing ahead with this year. Allowing the community of third party developers to contribute value (sound familiar Reddit?) is going to make the whole L2 space to gangbusters.

        As it stands now you can’t do much with Loopring except what the first party devs have built, which is basically a standard excahnge.

  •  Mars   ( @Mars@beehaw.org ) 
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    271 year ago

    It’s just another kind of MLM right now. It always has been. The superbowl Larry David add was the swan song for crypto mainstream appeal.

    And you are right, most of the people that were telling you to buy cryptocurrency for reasons, now are into the “prompt engineering” fad.

    Por metaverse, only the really unicorn-chasing and completely clueless about technology marketing “gurus” got into it.

  •  Wander   ( @Wander@yiffit.net ) 
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    261 year ago

    Nope. I use it on a weekly basis to pay for stuff on the internet. It’s got its uses and the concept is sound. What you’re talking about is the hype train that happens ever so often.

  • No, twitter just shit the bed is all and thats where the scams were primarily spread, but now that so many people have dropped twitter you don’t hear about it as much.

    Pretty much 1/3rd of the ads I get on Reddit, for example, are still crypto scams.

    I will agree though that it lost the crypto-bro sheen, thank god, and companies stopped trying to shoehorn it into everywhere it had no use case for.

    There are use cases for it but they are extremely specific and most of the time a normal database is the right tool for the job. You need to satisfy multiple conditions for a blockchain to be the right tool for the job over a normal DB.

    Furthermore, even if you do satisfy the requirements and use blockchain tech, its annoying to try and market that. Just as an example, how often do you see video game companies or gambling companies or other websites touting the fact they have, I dunno, a Redis mem server on their backend as a “selling point” of their service?

    No one. No one does that, no one cares. No one tries to market what database their backend uses as a way to make their product sound better, because no one gives a shit what your backend is built on top of. They care about the actual features and functionality of your product, not the tech your developers used.

    So hopefully we have now entered the era where some services do use blockchain on the backend when its the right tool or the job, but they don’t bother to try and market it and no one gives a shit if its MSSQL, Blockchain, Mongo, or whatever else that is used to store data.

  • Crypto won’t ever die, too many people have too much money invested in it for it to die.

    But it’s going nowhere. If I can’t buy groceries with a bitcoin, then it’s worthless. It got popular because people used it to trade drugs. I don’t even think you can do that on tor anymore.

      • Yeah. It might put me on a watchlist or something but, I’ve went on the Dark Web. I’ve never purchased anything or went too deep into it, but the only things I found are:

        some privacy services,

        some crypto “cleaning” (whatever the phrase is) services,

        some Tor mirrors of regular websites,

        a Luke-Smith-esque (only taken even further to the extreme) privacy related blog,

        a porn website (all of it legal, and it was all just indexed from clearnet porn sites, not even pirated, funnily enough)

        And there seemed to be a lot of drug websites. When I say a lot, I mean a LOT. Like, all of the websites listed above (can we even call them websites if they’re not on the worldwide web?) times 2 would be a lower number than the websites related to drugs that were listed on the various versions of the Hidden Wiki. And all of that by just using a page that acts as an indexer of the more popular pages. I didn’t even use a dark web search engine. So, yeah. Who knows what else might be hiding there? Some guys on YouTube go on the dark web, like this guy, John Hammond, and find some fun stuff there, like ransomware gangs. That is to say there is more serious stuff on there, but I haven’t looked for it.

      • While I think you’re right in that neither of those seem to be pyramid scheme, I disagree with the implication that they are any better (apologies if that was not the implication).

        They seem to just be creating an avenue for monotization of something that, I assume (but I could be wrong here), was previously free by nature, hence the necessity for an NFT to monetize it.

        I guess really that’s just what NFTs do, or at least their main use case. But I guess I just fundamentaly disagree with that idea.

      • Is it really though? If I were to go and buy my first ever crypto coin today would you really say the expected value is greater than 0?

        I have no doubt those who got in years ago or mine coins using other’s resources have an expected value greater than 0 but that’s not the entire market. I hope.

        • I guess it depends on your time-frame and your risk profile. BTC/ETH over the medium term has done much better than pretty much any other asset in the world. Altcoins didn’t even factor into my brain when I made that comment.