The only smart involvement in crypto was to spend a few minutes buying Bitcoin early on and holding on to it. Everything else — all the altcoins, stablecoins, NFTs, large ecosystem of startups, VC funds, DeFi, web3, payment networks, smart contracts, blockchains – has been an immense waste of time and resources.

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Zaskoda 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I disagree. Sort of. I agree that the things you listed like altcoins and stablecoins and NFTs aren't that valuable.

Note: I hate using the word "blockchain" to describe these decentralized networks hosting distributed ledgers, but it seem to be the word most people recognize. With that in mind:

Bitcoin was a first generation blockchain technology. It's the gold backed standard that supports the rest of the ecosystem and it always will be. That network should never do anything but be money.

Ethereum and all of the networks that replicate what it does are second generation blockchain technologies. They generalize what blockchain does to the degree that we can write arbitrary programs. It is a global decentralized computer, albeit a rather limited one. People use them mostly for finance because people have no idea what else to do with them.

Third generation networks are on the way. My favorite example is Polkadot and what Gavin is doing with JAM. This brings us a bit closer to what "Web3" was supposed to be about. JAM is something new, something different, upon which you can run all kinds of blockchain networks. Very few people understand how Ethereum works or how to use it. JAM is even more difficult to get your head around. But it is a radical paradigm changing technology.

The noise of altcoins and NFTs is the result of hype and greed. It overshadows Web3. It makes it nearly impossible for anyone working on Web3 tech to get any kind of coherent messaging out to the masses. And it will be that way for a while. But not forever.

All this to say that it's not wasted effort and it's not a dead end. It's just that what is valuable in the scene is almost impossible to see due to the overwhelming hype and nonsense.

	▲	kyle-rb 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Web3 is dead, because the VC valuation multiplier switched from "blockchain-native" to having an "AI story", so startups don't have to pretend to care about data-sovereignty anymore. Developers want to use Postgres, not a distributed ledger. And most end users don't really care about data-sovereignty. If I thought a significant percentage of my app's users did, I would much rather rewrite to conform to ATProto than touch anything on the blockchain.

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giraffe_lady 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

For a few years there it was really fertile ground for simple fraud, a great trade if you can get away with it. Most of them did.