I'm a bit discouraged to engage in the comments due to extremely harsh and negative attitude towards the subject. Where is all this negativity and skepticism coming from? Are people pissed they missed out investing in Bitcoin or osmething? Obviously there are a ton of scams out there, but there are also a lot of technically interesting projects. I'm just trying to educate myself and learn more...not get rich quickly.
1. People who speculatively hold an asset have an incentive to talk it up, even misrepresenting their own beliefs about its merits and future value. Thorstein Veblen wrote a whole thing about how this happened with real estate in the U.S., where people felt immense social pressure to persuade the broader public that a particular town was great because their assets and their friends' assets were tied up in land in that town and they all wanted their property values to rise. It's annoying for people if they feel that they're getting a pitch that's ultimately inspired more by someone's (possibly undisclosed) market position than by someone's honest assessment of the situation.
2. Altcoin creators and early investors stand to become rich, possibly at other people's expense, if there is sufficient interest and enthusiasm for an altcoin, even briefly, regardless of the altcoin's level of technical or economic innovation.
3. There's a lot of disagreement about economic ideology and policy issues around cryptocurrencies, familiar examples including Bitcoin's intentionally deflationary monetary policy and Monero and Zcash's privacy. This can add an extra level of contention and disagreement in this area, sometimes in the background, and people may be upset by the particular choices or policy goals that others have adopted. (And a lot of people have diametrically opposed beliefs about whether governments should have more or less power than they do today to set monetary policy, to monitor transactions, and to prevent particular entities from receiving payments.)
4. We've seen with the DAO and the current Bitcoin forks that there's also uncertainty about governance, including a conflict between people who want to see purely code-based rules set at the outset and enforced forever, and people who want some kind of community to have a way to amend the rules. To some people, the failure of meta-consensus about governance and decisionmaking is a long-term fatal flaw in cryptocurrency communities, and a way of glossing over something really necessary.
5. Cryptocurrencies have experienced high rates of frauds, scams, and theft that suggest to some people that they can't be taken seriously as a real part of the financial system, since the risks seem unacceptably high and there aren't straightforward ways to insure against them. Most new projects don't directly change this situation.
6. We've also seen tons of projects adopting blockchains that obviously don't need them because the participants in the system already trust each other or at least already trust a common authority that they agree is allowed to adjudicate disputes. In that case, the common authority can maintain a central database, or the participants can maintain a simpler distributed database and appeal to the authority to resolve any disagreements. (Maybe there are some cases where something blockchain-like is ultimately cheaper because it simply reduces the frequency of disputes that need to be adjudicated, but in any case a lot of people adopting blockchains seem to miss the point about trust and decentralization.) So there is a skepticism that says that most often when someone used a blockchain it was probably for buzzword-compliance.
The reason why I would came out at skeptic is because its proponents are full of shit, political and naive to the extreme and they are against government by default. Alternatively they are cynical businessmen riding with hype.
Proponents can't distinguish different roles of money. They have never heard of basic things like: optimal currency region, connection between balance of payments and exchange rate, smurfing ... They think they have discovered something else than just new payment and transaction method.
>Proponents can't distinguish different roles of money I'm pretty naive to this stuff, but you just listed a bunch of terms I easily googled in 2 minutes and now have a rudimentary understanding of. Sure there are tons of things to study in the field of finance, but I think the main idea is just a more decentralized setup and native "internet money".
Gold is extremely decentralized. You can't know how much I own of it. Yet, governments started taxing it, so they had to track ownership (however crudely).
Paper money started out decentralized as bank notes (basically IOUs stating 'this piece of paper can be exchanged for G grams of gold at bank B'). Yet, governments started taxing it, so they had to track ownership, in the end making centralized institutions that govern how much paper money is made.
I don't see any reason why blockchain wouldn't go the same way (income in bitcoin already is taxed in quite a few countries, AFAIK; it just is hard to track)
Quite a few vocal proponents advocated the idea that bitcoin could solve (¿perceived or real?) social problems with technology. That's naive.
>its proponents are full of shit, political and naive to the extreme and they are against government by default.
It is the "faith" or confidence that many people have in their government which gives psychological stability to their respective fiat currency, and Bitcoin threatens that faith
Also partly due to the fact that the technology is being overshadowed by the fin-tech bros looking to make a quick buck, and it's reflected in the quality and quantity of crypto related articles that are being written in the first place.
There are still some good discussions, but for the most part people are sick of seeing the same crap repeated daily with no critical thought or real news to speak of.
One clear thing to me was that Ethereum had no security story.
Well, it has a story for the security of the base challenge, an actually interesting story that if you have five different implementations that are evenly used, a hole in one of them won't affect the whole system (unless it reaches 50% adoption.)
However there is no security story for applications built on Ethereum. Thus the DAO hack, the ICO hacks, etc. Experience shows that you can't trust the run-of-the-mill programmer to get that kind of thing right, and you certainly can't trust bankers, traders, and fin-tech brogrammers!
There are also interesting reasons why blockchains were only developed lately. If you went to a distributed computing conference and presented a paper about a distributed system which did not improve it's ability to handle workload at all when you add more nodes, you'd get laughed out of the room.
And then there are the people who talk about "fiat currency" and who think that Bitcoin is like gold. Bitcoin is not like gold. People wanted gold 4000 years ago and they will want it 4000 years from now unless we are extinct or unless we find an asteroid which is made of solid gold. No way are people going to want Bitcoin 4000 years from now.
Do you mean that they got people to start using these terms as mass (like "water") or abstract (like "love") nouns without articles?
But, as to where skepticism comes from -- these so-called "coins" have been conjured out of thin air, are not backed up by anything or anyone, and have no intrinsic value. And yet somehow they have become worth over $100 billion.
Perhaps one or more cryptocurrencies will indeed emerge as a long-term store of value. But I think that skepticism is a quite natural reaction.
And the dotcom bubble was better, because at least the stocks had liquidity and were traded on established stock markets...
Missing on bitcoin is equal on missing on the power ball for me...
Basically I don't see anything in the crypto world yet, one day maybe when the technology is mature and real shares are traded on real stock exchanges, but right now, no thanks!
When it's another blockchain-as-a-cloud-serverless-service, it's usually made by cryptographic dilettantes who don't understand what is the blockchain's function and just want to join the hype bandwagon.
