> People have a natural predilection to gamble, but gambling has a bad wrap and so many gambling games have been declared illegal.

Gambling has a bad rep for a reason. It's one vice/outlet for entertainment that can very quickly spiral out of control. Much like hard drugs, it exploits weaknesses in our nature.

> What will you build on top of blockchains? Memecoins. Memecoins are the fundamental financial unit of crypto.

Isn't this kind of reductive?

It's also historically been very intertwined with organized crime, as it's pretty much the perfect business structure for money laundering.

There's much real adoption happening, especially within the Ethereum ecosystem:

https://ethereumadoption.com/

There's also many non-financial uses. Here's a non exhaustive list:

https://gist.github.com/hanniabu/32b0f933618a3229efe3fbc01cb...

> Cypherpunk's frustration with memecoins understandable. But I don't think the cypherpunks should be complaining. Guys, what exactly did you think your zero-rules financial substrates were going to be used for?! Memecoins are the point.

I expect it to be used for saving, and it mostly is. The market cap of Bitcoin is surly a million times that of every memecoin put together.

Any writing that says all cryptocurrency is one thing is likely touching only one side of the elephant and missing out on all the other use cases and perceptions. The idea that something has to be built on top of a cryptocurrency to be useful is a very etherium sort of ideology. And by the time the etherium memes had come into play the traditional finance speculators had hijacked things off-chain to their normal markets domain and made it so nothing new could be created in the cryptocurrency space (post 2015).

Guys where's the cybersecurity and fbi, we need to ban blockchains and do some refunds

(i think that a lot of people would be millionares if they get the money they gambled back. i also think that the government would just keep all the money and "invest" into the country's needs)

"need to accept the fact that blockchains will probably never become the backbone of everything. Instead, blockchains will continue to serve as a major hub for grimy low-finance; stuff like memecoins and ponzis that can't make the jump to official venues"

People have always loved to gamble.

But why are scams, rug pulls, pyramid schemes and outright Ponzis so wildly popular when relatively legitimate gambling like blackjack and roulette are available?

Why do people flock to skeezy finance when they can easily play less exploitative games where the house takes just 1% to 5%?

Maybe it's because deep down they know it's fraud, they know it will collapse, they know the people on the bottom will get wiped out, and they think they'll get out before the collapse.

On some level, the thrill is being in on the grift.

I think W. C. Fields said, "You can't cheat an honest man. Never give a sucker an even break or smarten up a chump."

> But why are scams, rug pulls, pyramid schemes and outright Ponzis so wildly popular when relatively legitimate gambling like blackjack and roulette are available?

You are mathematically guaranteed to lose your money playing roulette. Nobody ever got rich playing it unless they cheated somehow.

But you have a small chance of winning buying a meme-coin/stock/option.

> You are mathematically guaranteed to lose your money playing roulette.

The high-stakes tables in Vegas casinos typically have straight-up bet limits around $5,000 to $10,000. Some tables in Macau have limits of $50,000.

If you put $50,000 on your favorite number in Macau, you could win $1,750,000 plus your original $50,000 back.

You are not mathematically guaranteed to lose money on a roulette bet.

I think this is a gross misunderstanding of probability.

> You are mathematically guaranteed to lose your money playing roulette.

You can win roulette, people do all the time.

> But you have a small chance of winning buying a meme-coin/stock/option.

Right, but you also have a small chance at winning roulette. Love to see the math here, but I'm betting your roulette statement still applies:

> Nobody ever got rich playing it unless they cheated somehow.

Put differently, of course there are winners in roulette, even if it's often the house. I'd bet "the house" applies to crypto too.

The House for coins is usually the coin creators who grant themselves a hefty chunk of the coin during initialization then often sell off rapidly when the coin gets any traction. It's even more popular with Eth shitcoins where they can drain the real coins other people have put in out of the swap contract in exchange for their. It's so common there's new derivatives of the phrase "rug pull" that have existed for years in the space talk about the projects that turn out to be hollow money boxes for the creators to pillage.

A new wrinkle is project will claim that initial coin grants are locked but just not put that functionality in the contracts that define the code so the creators can still just rug the coin.

Everyone loses over time playing blackjack. Most people win over time buying bitcoin.

They're really that strained to explain the lack of business needs for blockchains huh?

Spoilers: This comment will be mostly about US politics. Hah, speaking of grifts and cons.

Considering JD Vance is a pro-crypto dude chosen by crypto billionaires, and we got a Doge-promoting as douche-in-chief, maybe a rogue superpower run by inept oligarchs will force a memecoin to be global currency very soon now.

Somehow the idea of IRS accepting crypto for tax payment doesn't feel that impossible...