I think that's a legitimate stance, but one way to put a silver lining on this writhing cesspool of dog-eat-dog bot-fuckery is to think of it as early-access alpha testing; ironing out exploits in the wild west before it's stable enough for the not-as-extremely-online to run something useful on.

The financial system did that already, hundreds of years ago. And it turned out that the most efficient way to iron out these bugs was through trust and regulation.

To an outsider, the entire crypocurrency world just looks like a giant exhorbitantly expensive not-invented-here syndrome recapitulating the entire early history of finance.

Did they, though? If I were to describe the finance industry, "trustworthy" and "well-regulated" would probably not be the first words I'd reach for. (EDIT: To be fair, I'm a pretty typical layman, and I might just be throwing stones at a strawman. Maybe EVIL GREEDY BANKERS are a rarity in an otherwise idyllic system, but that's not what's in the zeitgeist)

To be clear, I don't strictly disagree with your outsider interpretation, but...if it's recapitulating the history of finance at 100x speed, at a thousandth of the cost, with the end result of removing an aspect (centralization) that could plausibly considered an irreconcilable technical debt, then...I mean, I'm personally not in that world at all, but I think that smart contracts have a lot of potential, in the abstract, and I'm all for early adopters who aren't me volunteering as guinea pigs.

I genuinely think there's something novel here; I just don't know what form it will take, or how many millions of dollars we'll burn on shitcoins finding it. Like the first internet bubble--we'll have to shovel through a lot of pets.coms to find our proverbial Amazons.

[Tangentially, I'm reminded of something I read yesterday about the nonexistent technological breakthrough, Write-Only Memory:

"write-only memory: A form of computer memory into which information can be stored but never, ever retrieved, developed under government contract in 1975 by Professor Homberg T. Farnsfarfle. Farnsfarfle's original prototype, approximately one inch on each side, has so far been used to store more than 100 trillion words of surplus federal information. Farnsfarfle's critics have denounced his project as a six-million-dollar boondoggle, but his defenders point out that this excess information would have cost more than 250 billion dollars to store in conventional media."]

>> The financial system did that already, hundreds of years ago. And it turned out that the most efficient way to iron out these bugs was through trust and regulation.

>> To an outsider, the entire crypocurrency world just looks like a giant exhorbitantly expensive not-invented-here syndrome recapitulating the entire early history of finance.

> Did they, though? If I were to describe the finance industry, "trustworthy" and "well-regulated" would probably not be the first words I'd reach for. (EDIT: To be fair, I'm a pretty typical layman, and I might just be throwing stones at a strawman. Maybe EVIL GREEDY BANKERS are a rarity in an otherwise idyllic system, but that's not what's in the zeitgeist)

The GP isn't claiming that the finance industry is "trustworthy" and "well-regulated" in an absolute sense, just that the cryptocurrency world is repeating a lot of old mistakes for no good reason (making it relatively less trustworthy and well-regulated in comparison).

It turned out that the most efficient way to iron out these bugs _in the absence of computers_ was through trust and regulation.

It might still be through trust and regulation, but computers enable new ways of ironing out bugs.

I'm with you. Every time I see articles like this, it gives me the impression that Ethereum is just a giant distributed poker game where players are just trying to get as many chips from their opponent as they can without producing any meaningful value to the world outside of the table.

Maybe it has value as a honeypot to keep these amoral win-maximizers out of industries where they could do greater harm by targeting opponents that are not like themselves.

This is cynical and yet at the same time reassuring, since the entire crypto world is mysterious to me. I’ve never bothered to understand it, and it can be frightening to think that it might be the future, as inscrutable as it is.

Trust your gut, it absolutely is.