from Hacker News

Ask HN: Is crypto an unviable, tech-bubble delusion?

by confoundcofound on 7/27/23, 5:18 PM with 41 comments

As someone who's been in and out of the crypto space for years, recently it has felt increasingly as if this is a technology desperately in search of a UX solution that it may never achieve.

The industry is run by a cool kids club of crypto twitter thought leaders who seem to lack the experience and wisdom to realize that the threshold of UX required for mass adoption is currently wildly out of reach for the technology, no matter how pretty the UI is. Seed phrases, gas and fees, irreversibility of transactions, virtually no concept of customer support, etc etc.

Steve Jobs famously said "You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it." The entire crypto space seems to be guilty of the latter.

The longer that this space continues to focus on and struggles to get traction for novelty toy products – eg art experiments – the more pessimistic I am about the long term viability of the underlying technology. I say this with friends who work in the space who after years of pontificating about the disruptive implications of crypto, are still tweeting about the latest NFT collectible.

  • by cableshaft on 7/27/23, 7:01 PM

    I think it will be around for a long time to come in some form or another (especially Bitcoin and probably also Ethereum), but there are a lot of scams and grifts in the space, and a lot of experimentation that has ultimately failed.

    Even just as a speculative bet that moves quicker than the stock market, it has value. Some people are seeing wealth they would never have had a chance at if they did it the traditional way of investing in stocks and bonds, and it's transforming their lives (and a bunch of other people, unfortunately, have lost money, sometimes a lot of money, on the other end as well).

    I joined a video game startup that ultimately failed and probably lost out on at least $100k or more on money I could have made during that time at a larger corporation, especially since I didn't have a 401k then (I got paid, but a lot less than I would have elsewhere).

    It was a speculative bet that I made and I failed. I don't really see how that's much different than someone making a poor bet on crypto (assuming they only spent what they could afford to lose, of course).

  • by scottiebarnes on 7/27/23, 8:34 PM

    The main benefits of blockchain are: decentralized, permissionless, censorship resistant.

    Money and finance are the strongest applications where these properties benefit most.

    Writing and reading transactions on blockchains is a clunky UX, but worth learning if you want to secure/transmit a billion dollars through cyberspace with no intermediaries or authority saying you can't.

    Experimentation and high rates of failure is the nature of software on new platforms. So many websites, apps, games, etc. created for computers will utterly fail, but the ones that succeed end up defining generations (Minecraft, Excel, Google)

  • by WallyFunk on 7/27/23, 7:04 PM

    And to add insult to injury, not only is the UX bad, there is no rate limiting that happens like with normal banking, where alarm bells start ringing the minute large transactions are being made.

    And banks can reverse fraudulent transactions, whereas with crypto there is the 'code is law' thing and once it's set in stone on the blockchain, there is no going back.

    Also since modern computing is so leaky and insecure, crypto is being rampantly stolen all over the place. You could say the same about computing for banks, but the rate limiting, KYC, and anti-fraud measures are way ahead of crypto.

  • by gregjor on 7/27/23, 5:22 PM

    All the scams and fraud don't help. I don't think UX presents the main problem. People eventually saw through the hype and figured out that crypto doesn't add any value except for criminals.
  • by theandrewbailey on 7/27/23, 5:36 PM

    Years ago, I realized that blockchain tech is a solution in search of a problem, because the whole internet money thing hasn't worked out. It might turn into an asset class at some point, but it's hard for me to understand what it represents (aside from lots of math that does lots of nothing). Real estate and commodities are tangible things, and stock and bonds represent real things, too, but I'm struggling to see what Bitcoin, etc. are. Maybe something akin to forex, but forex never had the hype crypto did.
  • by pesfandiar on 7/27/23, 5:52 PM

    The UX is very poor when you expect the ecosystem to be anything other than a platform to screw unsuspecting marks out of their money.
  • by smoldesu on 7/27/23, 7:01 PM

    Yes, but the way you're rationalizing it is pretty insular. UX is not the problem - you can solve this a billion different ways. The problem is that unseating predominate concentrations of wealth is impossible. The stated goal that you (and others) are expecting is a pipe dream.

    > Steve Jobs famously said

    Steve Jobs was a good marketer and a mediocre businessman. The fact that so many people here take him at face value is like if researchers from the future thought Charlie Chaplin was a drama actor. It's embarrassing that anyone with the gall to call something a "tech bubble illusion" would cite Steve "Reality Distortion Field" Jobs, but here we are. I gotta get off this site...

    > The longer that this space continues to focus on and struggles to get traction for novelty toy products

    The space is novelty toy products. What did you really expect, for the IMF to roll over and "give you one for free"? Have you not followed the past century of macroeconomics?

  • by jstx1 on 7/27/23, 6:26 PM

    Anyone with a half a brain has known this a for a while now, it's not 2017 anymore. It's an embarrassing industry to be associated with.
  • by jtode on 7/28/23, 12:25 AM

    We use the underlying technology every day. The program is called git.

    The problem is thinking this is a useful way to represent fiscal value. Ain't.

  • by factorialboy on 7/28/23, 1:56 PM

    Cynical take.

    Bitcoin and crypto have a solid use case, whitewashing ill-gotten black money through money laundering.

    The corrupt and the criminals have ties with crypto whales, and they will pump and dump accordingly.

    If a individual investor/gambler is patient, it is possible that they could realize serious profits.

    Is it ethical? No.

    Is it human nature? Yes.

  • by superchroma on 7/27/23, 5:47 PM

    regulatory nightmare, and fundamentally not solving a problem nor greasing any significant wheels
  • by mikewarot on 7/27/23, 6:07 PM

    Cryptography will always be useful for helping to keep information secure.

    Blockchain will always have value when you need artificial scarcity on the Internet. The distributed ledger also has many uses outside of crypto currency.

  • by diavelguru on 7/28/23, 5:13 AM

  • by coldblues on 7/27/23, 7:47 PM

    Nobody talks about Monero in these discussions, but I'll be the person to keep mentioning it. Yes, the majority of crypto is garbage, because they don't have privacy in mind.
  • by matt_s on 7/27/23, 7:06 PM

    The problem with the crypto/blockchain is the domain is finance which is all about money.

    Using the Steve Jobs quote - what other problem domains could you back into where blockchain might be a good fit?

    A couple ideas:

    * user identity - anonymous, verifiable identity not tied to a corp or gov. use cases could involve managing logins/2FA to platforms w/o relying on a google/whatever identity

    * property management - tracking titles/deeds for real estate

    The challenge with any ideas is typical SaaS CRUD also solves these problems fairly well.

  • by leet_thow on 7/28/23, 1:55 AM

    Curious, were shitcoins ever a part of crypto startup compensation packages, like startup options have been?
  • by faangiq on 7/28/23, 4:32 AM

    Of course. It’s a pure scam except for btc which is just infeasible.
  • by THENATHE on 7/28/23, 6:45 AM

    We need to move to one or two cryptocurrencies and ditch all the other garbage. Bitcoin and etherium are here to stay, NFTs are dying or already dead