It's hard to argue with them because they have a financial stake in the system, it's in their interest to spread it as far and wide as possible because it will enrich them. Money clouds judgement.
The hope for global adoption just means "I got in first so I deserve to be rewarded". An honest answer would be that no one care about all the technology as long as number goes up.
Now as they usually say, cope and seethe, nocoiner.
It's hard to argue with your philosophy because the goal posts never stop moving.
Bitcoin worth anything above $0 would have been an absurd thought 10 years ago, now it's a global asset class worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Unstoppable money not backed by any state is an amazing accomplishment. This alone is a mind blowing fact to me, but again, to the HN crypto hater it's meaningless, because the definition of "success" is constantly moving.
Blockchain and finance are deeply intertwined, so a lot of applications built on digital financial rails (blockchains) are naturally around capital formation, derivatives, trading, etc. but to the socialist / statist that should be outlawed (not just in crypto but likely Wall Street itself) so that isn't anything to you.
One counterpoint is the HN shibboleth of Stripe. Stripe is barely a tweak on PayPal, or at least it was at first, yet everyone on HN ejaculated in amazement at the ability to take a credit card with a javascript function. Of course I think Stripe is a great company, I just want to put into context how on HackerNews, Stripe = "Amazing incredible glorious $100 billion epic company" and cryptocurrency = "Wow a trillion dollar asset built on pure computer science and economic principles created by mysterious cypherpunk, who cares".
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It's hard to argue with your philosophy because the goal posts never stop moving.
I'm not the one that picked that list of projects. You're the one who described them as having "promise", not me.
If there's some projects out there that have lived up to their promises and aren't just gambling enablement, please, list them!
I'll take a quick crack at a few:
Helium, which actually purported to use crypto to build a real-world impacting product? Fraud.
NFTs generally? Speculation, gambling, mostly fraud, rug manufacture (not in the textile sense).
Exchanges, derivatives, "yield" farming, etc. Mix of gambling, fraud, and simple wealth transfers.
Various DAO-style projects. My favourite is projects like Spice, buying real-world assets to leverage them in some way. All failures, some comically so.
Cheap money transfers? Nope. Gas fees, etc.
Store of value? Nope. Massively volatile.
Currency usable for real-world purchases/transactions? Nope. Too slow (also gas fees, etc).
And now I'm at the limit of what comes up off the top of my head.
The fact that billions of dollars have swept into a massively speculative market during a period of historically low yields isn't a surprise. The prospect of wealth transfers from the gullible to the rich will always draw in investors. But that isn't evidence of actual value or success, unless your measure of success is "how many people got rich on the backs of a lot of losers".
We've had over 10 years of crypto. At some point it'd be nice if we moved past "projects with promise" to "projects that lived up to their promises".
So far? All we have is an ecosystem that enables gambling and a truly astonishing amount of fraud.
So I have to ask: How much longer should we wait? Five more years? Ten? Or do we just keep waiting because the faith is unshakeable?