Three things make the bubbly/scammy nature of current generation cryptocurrency very obvious to me:
(1) The fact that nearly all cryptocurrencies move in unison even though they differ widely in adoption and real-world use cases. Many totally useless cryptocurrencies move perfectly in unison with the supposedly useful ones.
(2) The fact that complete jokes that barely work like IOTA still have large market caps. (This post will get tons of IOTA shill replies like any other IOTA-related post on the Internet... they have an army of bots and shills.)
(3) Adoption has actually declined with numerous early adopters from small shops to companies like Stripe and Steam abandoning cryptocurrency payments. If this is a tech climbing the adoption curve adoption should be increasing.
There are a few real world use cases of course, but they are nowhere near sufficient to support the current collective market cap of cryptocurrencies in the current ecosystem... that is assuming a significant fraction of that market cap actually exists and the whole thing isn't completely insolvent.
I think the furious religious defense of (current generation) cryptocurrency you find in tech circles comes from the underlying economic ideology programmed into it (what I call pop-Austrianism) and the fact that lots of tech types are bag holders who are hoping to cash out before the whole thing implodes but may currently be underwater. Without those motives the whole thing is just transparently insane.
(1) The fact that nearly all cryptocurrencies move in unison even though they differ widely in adoption and real-world use cases. Many totally useless cryptocurrencies move perfectly in unison with the supposedly useful ones.
(2) The fact that complete jokes that barely work like IOTA still have large market caps. (This post will get tons of IOTA shill replies like any other IOTA-related post on the Internet... they have an army of bots and shills.)
(3) Adoption has actually declined with numerous early adopters from small shops to companies like Stripe and Steam abandoning cryptocurrency payments. If this is a tech climbing the adoption curve adoption should be increasing.
There are a few real world use cases of course, but they are nowhere near sufficient to support the current collective market cap of cryptocurrencies in the current ecosystem... that is assuming a significant fraction of that market cap actually exists and the whole thing isn't completely insolvent.
I think the furious religious defense of (current generation) cryptocurrency you find in tech circles comes from the underlying economic ideology programmed into it (what I call pop-Austrianism) and the fact that lots of tech types are bag holders who are hoping to cash out before the whole thing implodes but may currently be underwater. Without those motives the whole thing is just transparently insane.