> Having lived through that era, the number one culprit that I would blame as the root cause of this shift is the rise in transaction fees.<p>Haha no, the number one culprit is that 99% of blockchain projects are either scams, bullshit, not actually decentralized, or simply fail despite pulling in vast amounts of funding (sometimes more than one of the above!).<p>However, I do agree that most--if not all--problems in the cryptocurrency space arise from the "currency" aspect. Just not so directly as "transaction fees".
> there is a large ideological rift where significant parts of the non-blockchain decentralization community see the crypto world as a distraction, and not as a kindred spirit and a powerful ally<p>This line stood out to me and is sad to see.
It is peculiar that there are strong discussion around crypto and Coinbase was in S12 batch [1] and one of the top by revenue. Paul Graham continues to praise and recognize how prescient Brian Armstrong was [2]. To be objective there were other companies in the space before Coinbase that are still alive [3].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/revenue">https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/revenue</a><p>[2] <a href="https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1740936771192623175" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1740936771192623175</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.coinfabrik.com/blog/oldest-blockchain-companies/" rel="nofollow">https://www.coinfabrik.com/blog/oldest-blockchain-companies/</a>
<i>"Use DEXes plus stablecoins"</i><p>The trouble is, neither of those make money if run honestly. A true distributed exchange never has custody of anything. So there's no opportunity to steal or speculate with customer funds. (Front-running remains a possibility). It's just a back-end data service. It has to charge a commission. Most crypto exchanges are free to use; they make money either by stealing or manipulation.<p>Much the same is true for stablecoins. Tether just printed another billion dollars worth of Tether. Nobody deposited a billion dollars worth of USD. USDC is supposedly backed by U.S. Government securities, but is not formally audited.
My user name is a reference to one of the hardcore cypherpunk coins<p><a href="https://www.getmonero.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.getmonero.org/</a><p>They also run the cryptocurrency village at Defcon.<p>Monero researchers have figured out how to do true atomic swaps between Bitcoin and monero, ensuring the exchange delistings will not kill the ultimate privacy coin <a href="https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1126.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1126.pdf</a><p>Finally, the IRS offered a bounty if you could trace XMR. Not claimed (as far as we know!). How many other coins have that level of state interest<p><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2020/09/14/irs-will-pay-up-to-625000-if-you-can-crack-monero-other-privacy-coins/amp/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2020/09/14/irs...</a>
Aaah, the ethereum + swarm + whisper infographic, oh I have missed you so.<p>This criticism he levies at web3 here is the core reason I stopped believing in the vision. I was a big fan of it when ethereum launched mainnet. Mist browser, a reference interface for a truly decentralized internet. The vision: decentralized message transport, file storage and consensus/finality/incentivization for applications that need it. What a beautiful idea.<p>Instead we got metamask and http websites selling us erc20 tokens.<p>I think I probably agree that a big part of it is transaction fees. I think though that the Ethereum project abandoning the idea of a reference client left people to develop with the tools they had. There's no money in building a new browser for a different kind of web. There is money in selling DAO tokens to supposedly fund a lock that can be locked and unlocked by sending a cryptographically signed transaction executed on every node on a network and paid for for no good reason to be kept on record forever by everyone on the network. Don't have the decentralized tools to build it? Eh, fuck it, just build a website with pretty animations and flat monochrome icons that fade in and out as you scroll. As long as they can send us ETH we are happy, we will decentralize the rest later when someone else does the heavy lifting.<p>We needed mist to make this happen. The reason web3 failed is because the only part of it that ever actually worked was ethereum, and that's all that's needed to get people to give you their money. If we had bootstrapped with swarm and whisper them there would've been no excuse from dapp builders why all they have is a regular website, and scams wouldn't have become so prolific because we would have a baseline standard: the whole thing has to be decentralized or you're not getting a dime.
> "When the cost of writing to the chain is $0.001, or even $0.1, you could imagine people making all kinds of applications that use blockchains in various ways...."<p>nonsense. plenty of chains do this, but all have the same copy-pasted dapps.<p>ethereum is horrible, cannot die soon enough imo. ETH and BTC maxis are also very toxic community.