I'm going to reprise a comment of mine that I posted on a similar HN article some time ago.
Over the years I've witnessed a lot of heated debates on HN... Is the JS ecosystem actually too complex? Is PHP really a fractal of bad design? Is learning vim worth the effort or is it all hype? Is golang fundamentally broken because it lacks(lacked) generics? Does anyone ever actually need k8s? Is nosql always the wrong choice? Is the linux desktop experience truly productive or should you just use a mac? Types or no types? 100% test coverage or overkill? X or Wayland? Gnome2 or Unity? Android or iPhone etc...
Yet, only in the cryptocurrency debate do defenders have to offer up a disclaimer about all the scams, hype, vaporware, fraud, waste, hacks, speculation, crime and other insanity before proceeding to make an appeal to the nebulous hope of future possibilities, as if cryptocurrency isn't older than instagram....
Part of what makes cryptocurrency so alluring is its (current) Wild West, little to no rules, nature. Those very things will scare aware the masses until things stabilize at which point we return to the current state of things perhaps with some modest differences.
People forget that the current financial system is a product of thousands of years of evolution and many hard lessons learned.
Web 3.0 (as VCs see it) is a solution looking for a problem. I get a late-90s dotcom-era feeling from it. People saying what it takes to raise money and throwing a technical solution at what often isn't one.
And completely ignore increasing talk of official state backed digital currencies which will be the Orwellian horror that results from all this crypto froth.
To be fair, none of those other debates have anything to do with finances and wealth tools or vehicles. There's inherently less incentive to scam people with those things because it won't make someone rich to do so (at least nowhere near the extent that other options, like stealing digital financial assets, would).
Email and websites in general have tons of scams associated with it, to the point where I'm required for whatever company or client I work for to take phishing/security awareness lectures every single year, yet those things don't "need to be defended".
False equivalence. Email and websites have immense self-evident utility, thus they do not need to be defended. Web3 doesn't actually solve any of the problems it claims to, so the proselytizers are always fighting hard to downplay all the problems it creates.
Over the years I've witnessed a lot of heated debates on HN... Is the JS ecosystem actually too complex? Is PHP really a fractal of bad design? Is learning vim worth the effort or is it all hype? Is golang fundamentally broken because it lacks(lacked) generics? Does anyone ever actually need k8s? Is nosql always the wrong choice? Is the linux desktop experience truly productive or should you just use a mac? Types or no types? 100% test coverage or overkill? X or Wayland? Gnome2 or Unity? Android or iPhone etc...
Yet, only in the cryptocurrency debate do defenders have to offer up a disclaimer about all the scams, hype, vaporware, fraud, waste, hacks, speculation, crime and other insanity before proceeding to make an appeal to the nebulous hope of future possibilities, as if cryptocurrency isn't older than instagram....