satoshi nakamoto will never recover from such a burn!

god i wish i had come up with this joke years ago

they are never gonna recover from this.

it was only ever good for buying things you shouldnt and its not really great for that either

in case you are asking sincerely,

Is it too late to be doing crypto stuff

tldr: yeah pretty much, it's all rancid, and your effort would be better spent elsewhere

I was in Crypto Stuff off-and-on for a few years.

the pool of Idealistic Talented Engineers Building Crypto Shit has kind of dried out. there's not much goodwill or hope that cryptocurrencies will be anything other than a scam platform.

The Ethereum Name Service is probably the best example of where the cracks shown. ENS was a pretty straightforward and necessary idea (unless you want to try to revive petnames for identifiers in global namespaces). ENS is arguably an improvement on DNS.

The problem is that when ENS dropped, every neat domain was instantly gobbled up by rent seeking assholes. For all the Good Design of the tech, it was worthless, because nobody wants to do anything worthwhile on Ethereum.

It's kind of a shame. I was involved in a volunteer project that started after the covid pandemic, where the intention was to create supply chains for disaster relief which were resistant to significant infrastructure collapse. Being able to set up bartering and trade systems based on peer-to-peer communications (bluetooth) would be super useful for disaster relief. This was a problem with a solution that overlapped significantly with cryptocurrency technology (and other adjacent tech, primarily SSB.)

There was a lot of potential in that project, but a lot of people (myself included) lost faith in it because of cryptocoin shit.

Another major issue is that the years have shown that "smart contracts" are really difficult to get right. Solidity (used to code on Ethereum) is a leaky abstraction. Anything except very simple features and ERC-20 tokens ("shitcoins") are likely to be broken in a year.

If you do want to do "crypto stuff", I think it'd be in the form of picking up the pieces. I was responsible for the design of a tool that was going to use ZK-snarks for some sysadmin shenanigans, and yeah, the most mature implementation was for some Ethereum thing.

The only thing left in cryptocurrency that's "good" (in the sense of fulfilling its basic goals) is the ability to make private payments. Even then, this requires a lot of effort, technical knowledge, and opsec, and is usually only worth it for hierarchical organizations. (So, a sex worker or your plug is less likely to use Monero, but someone a layer or two up might.)

I think the most interesting bits within cryptocurrencies would require the minimum of the following:

• Consumer tech should be capable of being a full node over inconsistent P2P connections.
• On that note, it should be usable by end users without a compromisable intermediary.
• The tech does not reward rent-seeking or other destructive capitalist behavior. (Again, ENS)
• Uber, DoorDash, etc. would shut down, because gig-economy workers would make more money operating over this network
  • (seriously, one of the biggest failures of cryptocoins is that uber still fucking exists)
  • (what was the point of this all if uber still takes 30%)

And this is all assuming you think the goal of "enabling a currency-based economy" is something you think is a noble one, which is a whole different thing to talk about.