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I like the idea behind Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies, but not religiously. I think we still need centralization in technology to solve real-life problems and I think the crypto industry religiously favors tech over solutions and disagrees on everything important.
Reliability: Decentralized solutions may have a 99.99% downtime (although there are some exceptions, i.e IOTA), but that comes at a price: Performance.
Performance: Centralized solutions are an order of magnitude better than decentralized ones for various tasks. Think of Twitter over Mastodon, VISA over Bitcoin, AWS S3 over IPFS, etc.
Legal: I usually don't care about this part, but it's hard to build a business on top of something that is highly regulated while claiming it's a "Freedom movement". Imagine selling colored water to someone and calling it juice.
Usability: Projects such as eBay or Gmail didn't succeed because they used a particular technology, they succeeded because they solved an important problem efficiently. Bitcoin solved decentralized money transfer at the cost of speed, but the majority only care about the latter.
Scalability: Some consensus protocols are unscalable. Having an unscalable project is fine, but it's not if your project happens to be a protocol meant to be used by the masses.
PoW does solve the initial distribution problem, but at the expense of scalability. PoS does the opposite. Centralized solutions have both.
People: If you are on crypto twitter, you exactly now what this is about. Some think only one protocol should exist and rule them all (and yet claim to be pro-freedom), while others envision the opposite. This is weakening an industry that is already very fragile.
UX: The average Joe doesn't get the "Internet money" thing and uses a bank account over crypto, it's simpler and relies less on him and his ability to take care of his money.
I'm not saying that every crypto/blockchain project should die, far from this. I think people should still experiment on top of it as this is how progress is made. I'll always be pro-technology, but will also always favor usefulness over it.
This thread isn't unconditional. Perhaps great projects solving interesting problems will emerge one day. These are just my current thoughts as I'm taking a break from Blockchain/crypto.
