I don't know any serious developers nor scientists who have are bullish on crypto. Only developers I know who are into it spend most of their time hyping up their next rug pulls.
Yeah, there are hundreds of thousands of "serious" developers working in the cryptocurrency space. I'm working in the space. No, my employer doesn't have a tokenized project. I'm not even working directly with web3, though I use it.
Many of us have a practical attitude which is effectively that the technology has massive potential, and at the same time, that it's probably overvalued for the current state of technology.
Of course, overvalued is subjective. It could all still amount to nothing, but it could also replace tons of legacy/traditional infrastructure and systems, and/or create a new global financial layer based on currencies whose supplies can't be manipulated by governments. The valuation is of course massively coupled to the perceived potential and the varying levels of conviction speculators have in it, which incentivizes a lot of disingenuous behaviours.
I'm not questioning that there are great engineers working on crypto, there are amazing engineers working on ad tech and high frequency trading too. Just like those examples I'd assume it's mostly because it's an interesting engineering problem and there's a ton of money to be made.
The only exciting potential use case of crypto that I've seen so far are DAOs, but I'm not convinced that there's any reason why they need to be on a blockchain instead of postgres or sqlite.
I know plenty of people, including friends who got filthy rich on crypto, but I still haven't seen a single interesting use case of crypto that's not mindless speculation.
You have an easy way to win the argument, a simple proof by example will be enough to prove me wrong. So please list the amazing scientific breakthroughs or concrete examples of web3 tools that my mother could use.
well for one, i am also a skeptic. i just like to be proven wrong by foundational cracks and there are plenty of extremely smart people in the space. i'm certainly not arguing with you around blockchains being a useful tool today. however, i have an imagination and can foresee some usecases where the blockchain would truly change some of the way we do things. will it free us from our so called "shackles?" that a lot of the hypers like to say? probably not. or maybe? who knows. i'll tell you one thing -- there are many successful people investing in the space and generally, success follows success, so i'm optimistic from that viewpoint alone.
my main argument with your arguments is that close mindedness and flippancy doesn't get us anywhere.
My brother is really big into crypto, and convinced my dad to get $1k in ETH. Over thanksgiving, they were hanging out talking about crypto, and my dad said he wanted to mess around with swapping tokens around and layer 2's but didn't want to touch his principal. So he opened AAVE, deposited his ETH, and got a loan in about 5 minutes flat. I thought that was pretty cool? I've never taken a loan for anything but student loans but I imagine it would be infinitely more difficult and time consuming to get a small personal loan like that from a bank.
I definitely agree that a TON of the crypto space is super scammy, and think it's an absolute shame, I don't blame anyone for being scared off.
It's not? I feel it would be disingenuous to imply that traditional 'fast' loan providers can match the speed/ease of getting a loan in 5 minutes, sitting on your couch, on thanksgiving day, with the funds instantly being available and requiring no documentation, forms, or manual approval. I mean if I'm wrong feel free to show me, I might just be ignorant.
