So at that point (Summer 2011), I took a long hard look into the mirror, discussed this with friends, both on- and offline, and everyone was struggling to find real use cases that didn't involve crime. When then, later in 2011, Litecoin and the other alts came on the scene, without any real difference, I left the crypto scene.
Now, over 10 years later, the number of real life use cases not involving crime is still scarce. That's a bit embarrassing, if you ask me.
(Edit: small correction)
I was quite young at the time, but I've since learned that just because something has no value, doesn't mean you can't make money trading it.
There's probably a third utility, which is having lots of Bitcoin means you have lots of dollars, which means people know you're rich and want to date you, be friends with you, party with you in Miami etc. But it's interesting to notice (this is a bit trite but I think not totally) that people still tally crypto wealth in dollars ("he's a crypto billionaire" doesn't mean he has billions of bitcoins) so the utility of bitcoin seems to implicitly be that it's worth lots of dollars.
You like the idea that you're a contrarian.
But he always seemed kind of full of BS with Opsware and stuff and cashed out by selling to a greater fool, I think HP or something.
So I’ve always looked at his offerings and not understood why they are valuable.
I never thought he was trying to scam, but this clip seems to be total BS to the extent that they are just cashing in on a more broad set of greater fools.
If a large group of people want crypto it will exist regardless of the engineering merits.
One kindof criticism of social media is that it's very performative. Many solutions I've seen involve the idea of adding some kind of friction. "slow to process" is obviously bad, but the idea of adding costs to things isn't one I'd outright rule out.
transcript and audio: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/marc-andreessen/
