Of course, I heard about Bitcoin back in the early 2010s. I did not get into it; on the one hand, because I thought it was too much of a Ponzi scheme, I still think it is, but it lasts surprisingly long and could have gotten some nice profits even for the ones in the middle of the pyramid; on the other hand, because I did not like the right-wing, libertarian, anti-state, anarcho-capitalist foundation of the whole thing, and I still don’t like it.
Doing cryptos to evade some imagined dictatorship of (central) banks; to avoid taxes, which are necessary to build strong societies; because of some conspiracy theories about fiat money creation; still is despicable to me.
Fast forward to 2021: The counter-arguments to Bitcoin have got an addition in recent years: the unprecedented ecological cost of the whole proof-of-work thing. Even if they would use renewables for it (which they to a large percentage do not), it still would take away that energy from uses that are more beneficial.
So, when deciding to do some investments in addition to the national pension insurance, I had a look at the proof-of-stake chains and chose to put a rather small amount into Cardano in June 2021. The rest is still in ETFs and some stocks and I won’t change that for the foreseeable future.
My bubble still is very critical of cryptocurrencies and they have very good reasons to be. The money-laundering, tax-evasion, energy-burning all are still there and, new in 2020/2021, the NFT hype is riddled with misconceptions of what you really own there, providing countless opportunities to make fun of cryptobros complaining about “right-clickers”, losing their precious ugly apes to scammers,… And this hype still takes place predominantly on a world-burning proof-of-work chain (Ethereum).
On the other hand, there is this fascinating technology and this very nice community, where it really seems to be very common to think about, what good the technology could do to the world, where you can raise suspicion on hypes and only get very good discussions about it.
On the other other hand, this is all still in its infancy (even after a decade).
People lose their coins to scams and hacks and the educational introductions are obviously so suboptimal that they somehow think that wallet app developers have access to it, when they complain loud enough, and we have to explain very basic stuff in very stressful situations, when it’s too late, anyway.
Blockchain solutions are still oversold for a thousand use cases, where they have next to no benefit – from digital identities to education credentials to health records.
And somewhere in the back, people complain about the current ADA exchange rate, the slowness of a full node, the inadequacy of a hyped decentralised exchange, or other quite irrelevant stuff.
I hope this will all be consolidated at some point, but it will definitely take a lot of work until then.