Reading another long essay that argues crypto isn’t useful for anything much. This is true (though the usual suspects won’t agree), but really isn’t the same as arguing that it will not become useful. The future can take a long time.

Any new tech starts out simple and useless. Then it gets much more complicated and remains mostly useless. Sometimes, after even more work, it becomes useful. Sometimes not.

But you need a theory for how that will evolve. You can’t just say ‘this is useless! and equally, you can’t just say ‘PCs looked useless too!‘. There is no predictive value in this exchange. Of course it looks useless now / how could it get better, or why can’t it?

Equally, success can come in different sizes. Almost every adult on earth has a smart phone, but after 40 years of Moores law games consoles are still a small niche, and drones and 3-D printing are fantastically cool technologies with no consumer use case.

Given crypto is in many ways open source 2.0 (including the religion) its progress is instructive. The iPhone is full of OSS, and yet it’s closed, and yet it has millions of apps. 0SS was going to destroy Microsoft but instead Microsoft bought GitHub. The future is complicated

There is an enormous and almost unprecedented amount of bullshit in crypto. Maniacs talk about the end of government, scammers work through every scheme from 1920s Wall Street, and NFT exchanges sell nothing but third-rate clip art. But, this has no predictive value.

Every time people say crypto will never work because there are no use-cases a decade in (which is mostly but not entirely true), I think of this very widely-circulated 2010 essay claiming Facebook would never make money. Spot the logical fallacy https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2585-facebook-is-not-worth-33000000000