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HN hates crypto so they won't recognize it, but there is a massive brain drain and innovation drain leaving the USA right now. Cryptocurrencies are the future of money, whether you want to believe it or not. For the first time, humans can have money free from the whims of a government and the whirr of their money printer. That's a revolutionary idea. This won't be stopped by any government, you can only put your country at a disadvantage by ignoring it or trying to impede it.



> This won't be stopped by any government, you can only put your country at a disadvantage by ignoring it or trying to impede it.

Countries have tried and were pretty successful? China banned it, and now it's pretty difficult to trade crypto in China. The US can pass legislation tomorrow saying no crypto no more, and it will be effectively banned from the US. How are you going to trade crypto when nobody wants to touch it?

If you don't comply, your bank will shut down your accounts, the people running the exchanges will get arrested, their websites will get seized, etc. The US financial system is pretty good at keeping track of where USD goes after all, it'll get pushed into the shadow financial sector where all the other crime lives, and that seems pretty much the end for all the new crypto projects.


They can make it hard to interface with the traditional fianqncial system but they really can’t stop crypto wallets from being used can they? I know this makes it useless for most people just wanting to clarify.


> They can make it hard to interface with the traditional fianqncial system but they really can’t stop crypto wallets from being used can they?

Same way they can't really, with 100% precision, stop people from buying or selling fentanyl. But I don't think that says much here, does it?


Crypto isn’t the future of money.

No one uses it. Its literally a few thousand people left on-chain.

The DAUs of OpenSea is down to a couple of thousand.

All that hype, all that money just to serve two thousand people…

Frankly, its also completely unusable. Gas cost shot up to $50/transaction on Eth mainnet because every idiot was buying memecoins named PEPE and CHAD. Even L2 solutions like Arbitrum were up to $2/transaction. ZkSync mainnet was $15-20/transaction.

And that’s when there are only a few thousand active users. Imagine what happens if millions actually do come onchain.

The “future of finance” is being held hostage by idiots trading shitcoins.


Crypto is a great service.

But I do not see it as anything other than that.

My process goes like this.

I buy the crypto I need to send, I send it, I am left with 2 or 3 us dollars I didn't use in a wallet until I need to use it again.

Better and easier than PayPal, but there are risks such as it isn't secured or backed up and I am ok with those risks.


> a few thousand people left on-chain. > all that money just to serve two thousand people

This is clearly false and I welcome you to try and prove otherwise.


You know all on chain data is visible, right?

1. NFT platforms usage volume. OS is down below 5,000 users [0]

2. Arbitrum airdrop to 625k wallets. Most users have multiple wallets. I got airdrops on 3 different wallets. Some friends sybilled this to over 100 wallets. Actual unique wallets not more than 100k. Even free money can't entice people to use this. [1]

3. $PEPE total holders: 35,000. Exclude bots and multiple wallets and that's not more than 15k actual users. Hottest memecoin that shit up to $150M mcap in four days. [2]

4. USDT daily unique senders/receivers - under 80,000. This doesn't exclude bots, exchanges, smart contracts, and users with multiple wallets (I have 8 wallets). You also can't go more mainstream or "utility" than this coin. Real unique daily users are probably under 30k. [3]

Exchange users are immaterial. They're just traders and investors buying the next cycle of trash. Actual usage metrics are on-chain users.

This is being pitched as the next Visa but in reality, the network slows to a crawl even when it has to serve 10-20k real users. Meanwhile, Visa is able to serve literally hundreds of millions of users every month.

0. https://dune.com/queries/1622348/2688962?utm_source=mintorsk...

1. https://dune.com/blockworks_research/arb-airdrop

2. https://etherscan.io/token/0x6982508145454Ce325dDbE47a25d4ec...

3. https://etherscan.io/token/0xdac17f958d2ee523a2206206994597c...


I am not interested in getting into the weeds, but honestly, the fact that you're pointing to actual memecoins like "$PEPE" and spurious DAU measurements, but still ceding a 10x of your original 1-2k users claim gives me very little confidence in you being a serious person.


I have very little confidence in your reading comprehension. I said DAUs of OS (OpenSea) are down to a few thousand, not all of crypto.

I also shared unique transacting addresses for USDT yesterday. That's surely not a memecoin, and that was under 80,000 addresses yesterday.

I trade crypto and its very profitable, but don't waste your time buying the hopium of this scam.


Bitcoin: around 4,000,000,000 USD transacted yesterday on-chain (not counting off-chain)[0].

Ethereum: around 3,000,000,000 USD transacted yesterday on-chain (not counting off-chain)[1].

[0] https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/estimated-transac...

[1] https://www.theblock.co/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/ether...


This is such a quintessentially crypto huckster response, with all the usual blind spots in all the usual places. You've measured virtual dollars, while OP was measuring actual human users.


He didn't. Like he admitted, it's not possible to do so with any sort of accuracy using on chain data. There are over a billion Bitcoin addresses but this might overcount the number of users since wallets are typically composed of multiple addresses, or it could undercount due to the popularity of custodian service where multiple users share the same addresses.

The best we can do are surveys. According to this one[0], there are around 34 million Americans that have a cryptocurrency wallet. I suppose the world wide number of users is a lot higher.

[0] https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/us-adults-crypt...


Your link isn't showing up yet , but I can answer anyway with my own survey. I can account for over a hundred different crypto wallets, including a number of duplicates on the same chain, some of which have been active at one point or another over the past decade. At one point about 6 years ago it was close to a thousand. And in the circles I used to frequent (miners and pool ops - often the same entities), this was a middling number, not extraordinary at all.

The simple observation that one runs* into the same several dozen people over, and over, and over again at every crypto congregation whether online or in person, should be a strong indication that this is an extremely inbred space and the sock puppetry amplification from principal to agent is conservatively inflating usage metrics by a factor of 100 if not more.

* edit: okay this is somewhat dated information, maybe today it's a couple hundred instead of several dozen.


I'm in a few telegram groups with a bunch of large whales, including a few influencers you would know by name if you're active on Twitter.

One of these whales has a bot farm sybiling every protocol imaginable 24x7. Got an Arbitrum airdrop of over 1,000,000 tokens across more than 800 wallets.

I have about 10 addresses in my main Metamask account, and I have iirc 4-5 Metamask accounts, each with minimum 2-3 addresses.


> I can account for over a hundred different crypto wallets, including a number of duplicates on the same chain, some of which have been active at one point or another over the past decade.

Indeed, on-chain address data is more or less useless for counting users, I mentioned this in my comments. The survey I shared wasn't based on on-chain data.


On-chain data establishes a useful upper bound on active user count, but does not say the actual number. The upper bound is low enough to say that it's a few thousand users.


The upper bound would be over 1 billion for Bitcoin (1+ billion unique addresses)[0]. The number of daily active addresses is around 1 million[1]. And that doesn't account for second layer transactions. Where do you get the "few thousand" from?

[0] https://studio.glassnode.com/metrics?a=BTC&category=Addresse...

[1] https://studio.glassnode.com/metrics?a=BTC&m=addresses.Activ...


I literally shared on chain data. That's actual users. Even if you assume that all 80k unique wallets that exchanged USDT yesterday were real users, that's just...80,000 users. Niche forums have more users than that.

Anyone who has ever created an account on a crypto exchange has a crypto address. I have accounts at Binance, WazirX, Kraken, Crypto.com, Gate.io, Mexc, ByBit, and probably 2-3 more exchanges I can't remember. That means I have 10+ addresses.

But that's not real users. Any money I've sent to exchanges is just for trading/investing. I'm not actually using the tech.

On-chain usage is the only real usage. The rest is just banking with more hurdles and scams.


People don't have to use something every day to be users.

I mostly just buy crypto once a month and every once in awhile make a purchase with it when it makes sense (usually either towards a new computer or some place I don't want getting my credit card info).

If crypto became the default (which I'd be fine with), I'd use it all the time. But there's enough fees converting from USD to crypto and then making a purchase on top of that, as well as hassle with taxes each year (since I do report crypto transactions on my taxes) that trying to use it for all transactions, currently, isn't worth it for me.

So on most days I wouldn't even show up in that 80,000 DAU (well, especially since I don't touch USDT at all, keep in mind there's quite a few coins out there, not everyone interacts with all, or even more than a few of them).

And yet I keep up with crypto news, read crypto forums, watch videos about crypto, on an almost daily basis. Personally, I'd consider myself a user of crypto, and find it to be a useful tool. But just like my drill or my hammer, I don't use it every single day, just when the situation calls for it.


My point is that the network doesn't scale to fit even these very few daily users.


> But that's not real users.

I think we're in agreement here? On-chain data is more or less useless for counting actual users. That's why I was sharing survey data, which is the best approximation we can get.

For actual users using the tech, it's also difficult to know but we can see that the on-chain transaction volume is quite significant (multi billion dollar daily).


> On chain data is more or less useless for counting actual users.

I assume anyone who owns crypto but hasn't made any on-chain trasaction to not be a real user but just a speculator. Ergo, immaterial if you're talking about the viability of the network to scale.


I meant it was useless in the sense that we can't accurately determine the number of users from looking at on-chain data. As you've also explained in earlier comments, there is the issue of "multiple addresses - one user" and there is the issue of "single address - multiple users". If we ignore the latter issue, we can put an upper bound at ~1 billion users for Bitcoin due to the unique address count but that's just an upper bound, the actual number is lower but we can't know how much lower.


We're on the same page but we're looking at different metrics. I'm talking about daily usage which, even if you assume that every wallet is a unique user, is in the tens of thousands at most.

The entire point is that crypto adoption is abysmally low for a tech that almost every tech literate person in the world has heard about now, and that this tech falls apart even for this limited user base.


> I'm talking about daily usage which, even if you assume that every wallet is a unique user, is in the tens of thousands at most.

That's incorrect. The number of daily active addresses for Bitcoin is around 1 million[0].

> The entire point is that crypto adoption is abysmally low for a tech that almost every tech literate person in the world has heard about now, and that this tech falls apart even for this limited user base.

To me, that's super impressive given that many people on HN initially dismissed. I personally never thought it would grow beyond the initial group of cryptography/p2p nerds. I was super shocked when Bitcoin was mentioned on TV for the first time. Has any non-governmental money ever made it that far? I don't think so. It's come a long way, but I understand the numbers are a bit disappointing to those who were expecting Bitcoin to completely displace fiat. And in the end, it's a matter of perspective and there's no right or wrong answer.

[0] https://studio.glassnode.com/metrics?a=BTC&category=Addresse...


Apples and oranges. I'm talking about real usage. You're talking about people exchanging house money for more make believe money.

Crypto has been positioned as the decentralized alternative to Visa and SWIFT. Their real human users number in the tens of millions daily.

The point remains that if the tech falls apart even with 10-20k real daily users, how does it ever scale to 10-20M daily users?

Also, Bitcoin transaction volume peaked in 2018 and has been trending down for a while :)


No, this is the on-chain transaction data ("real usage"). The transactions you are referring to ("exchanging house money for more make believe money") is the exchange volume which does not appear on chain and is a lot higher ($18,000,000,000+ for Bitcoin yesterday).

I'm not sure why you say transaction volume peaked in 2018, it didn't. You can zoom out from the graph I linked to and chose the "All" timeframe. There's a lot of variance but 2018 wasn't the peak.

> The point remains that if the tech falls apart even with 10-20k real daily users, how does it ever scale to 10-20M daily users?

Second layer systems like the Liquid network.


Does this chart look like the volume is growing vis-a-vis the marketcap and marketing?

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactions.ht...


That graph is for the number of transaction, not transaction volume. Bitcoin has a max amount of transactions per block and blocks have been more or less saturated since a while so the number of transactions can't actually increase. It certainly doesn't look like it's decreasing. A lot of the transactions has been moving to second layer solutions as well, with on-chain becoming a sort of settlement layer.


I encourage you to find out the difference between "crypto" and Bitcoin

I think the Lightning Network has the potential to onboard millions of people today, and billions in the future. Check out how to run you're own node, be your own bank with Bitcoin and ignore the unscalable and scammy side "crypto" projects


You need to get the people on LN first, which requires an on-chain transaction. If we assume 10 tx/s (which is very generous) you need over 11 days just to onboard 10,000,000 people. Then if somebody did some funky business with the channel and it needs to get closed to save your funds (have fun monitoring all your channels by yourself or paying somebody else to do it), you need to wait for another on-chain transaction to get access to your funds again.

All of this assuming that the routing problem has been solved and the big hubs (I'd call them banks) are able to serve the transactions from their initial funding and don't have to wait to open channels with more funds.

LN is something that works well in a lab but collapses when used by more people than just a few nerds.


First off, props for admitting that LN could get 10 million users on board in 11 days, even with a conservative 10 tx/s estimate. If you look into channel factories, this could scale the potential users to 100 million users in less time than ChatGPT took, which is the most viral product of the past few decades. Is that not good enough for you?

About the whole routing problem and "big hubs" thing – remember, the LN is all about being decentralized. As more users and businesses join in, routing gets better and better, so you won't have to rely on any single big player. Plus, with the LN's atomic multipath payments (AMP), payments can take different paths, making it even easier to send Satoshis around the world. You can run your own node with a 10 year old Thinkpad you can buy on Ebay for $100.

Also anyone with Cash App can send Bitcoin over LN, today. I don't think you would call everyone with that app a nerd, would you? There are farmers, grandmothers and people in the developing world using Bitcoin to survive today, those aren't nerds to me.

Btw it's pretty funny calling other people nerds when you lurk on HN. If you haven't noticed, nerds have been running the world for a while now.


Bitcoin transactions aren't exactly exploding. And now that chain is also getting cluttered with trash jpegs (Ordinals).

I get the idea and appreciate it. But it's too cluttered with scammers, fraud, and plain money laundering to fulfill its original mission.

I would be happy if it goes down because if it does succeed in its mission, it pretty much means some truly awful human beings will have disproportionate power in our new financial system.

I'd rather not live in a world where Justin Sun owns a large % of my currency supply.


> Bitcoin transactions aren't exactly exploding. And now that chain is also getting cluttered with trash jpegs (Ordinals).

Pick one, it can't be empty and cluttered at the same time

> I would be happy if it goes down because if it does succeed in its mission, it pretty much means some truly awful human beings will have disproportionate power in our new financial system.

Typical HN cope

> I'd rather not live in a world where Justin Sun owns a large % of my currency supply.

It doesn't matter if he owned more than Satoshi, no individual has the power to change the rules of Bitcoin, that is what makes it so powerful

Remind me again what the original mission of Bitcoin was again? It's in the first few lines of the whitepaper if you forgot


What do you mean by no one uses it?

The market cap of btc says otherwise…


Using as money, not trading.


Market cap is the better metric.


Why when USDT is printing a billion in tether several days a week. They are artificially pumping the price.

https://twitter.com/whale_alert/status/1649159592520085507?s...


It's a useless metric if no one is using it. It's a magical purely speculative number.


Market cap is by definition people using it. They’ve exchanged their money for it.


using has many meanings here, and store of value was only one of them


> Market cap is by definition people using it.

You and I have very different dictionaries it seems

> They’ve exchanged their money for it.

A thousand people trading magical tokens they pretend cost trillions of dollars doesn't make it: a) worth trillions of dollars and b) any significant usage


Eh? The fact that people have exchanged trillions of “real” dollars for them means precisely that’s what they are worth lol.


That is not how market cap works.

I start a company: SquidSoft, LLC. I sell you equity: 0.000000001% of SquidSoft, LLC for $1. Bam, SquidSoft, LLC’s market cap is $1T even though only $1 has traded hands.


Market cap is meaningless. Using market cap as a metric anyone can become the richest person in the world. See here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/igENXZRECOs


Cryptocurrency tech just plain sucks. After more than a decade this is pretty obvious to most everyone. It's not the future of money, not even close, and with LLMs siphoning all the fuel out of the crypto hype machine, most people don't even care anymore - cryptocurrency is a dead meme walking.


There's nothing revolutionary about it. Commodity money was the original form of money. Crypto-currency is an attempt to create digital commodity money, except that this is obviously impossible. Instead they have created a fiat currency (because it's created out of thin air) with a promise attached that they will only print a fixed amount of it.


> HN hates crypto so they won't recognize it, but there is a massive brain drain and innovation drain leaving the USA right now.

That’s the narrative the crypto influencers want you to believe, but it’s not true.

Web3 / crypto projects are having a huge difficulty recruiting, even in this market. Few people want to go work in crypto because the writing is on the wall.


Nothing new here, but from all these years of experience, the only practical applications for crypto that I've encountered have been attempts to extort money from me, to defraud me, or to simply speculate. Future of money?


The opportunities to borrow cryptocurrencies without collateral are nonexistent and this requires a bank license either way. I don't see the innovation.

If you want to look at the past of money, there is the Chiemgauer which is the most successful complementary currency in Germany and even that one only did 7 million € worth of actual consumer/business transactions in 2015 (there are no updated statistics but it is ongoing and growing).

People keep using the national currency because it reduces transaction costs.


the US should be happy that a bunch of "get rich quick schemers" & snake-oil salesmen are leaving and losing their shirts in the process


Disagree on the brain drain. Curious as to where you believe the talent is going?


>Cryptocurrencies are the future of money

LOL


I don’t have a horse in the race but I’m curious why you think that?


Bitcoin is the future, not cryptocurrencies.

No one is going to use a company's token as money in any meaningful way at scale.

Only Bitcoin will be used as money the way we understand money now because it's an open and neutral protocol. An internet-native money.


>Bitcoin is the future Nope


Yep.

I can understand why you would dismiss it if you haven't taken the time to really understand it, or just been fed a stream of anti-Bitcoin propaganda to fool you into thinking you're "informed" about it.

But it's going to be foundational technology to the future of the Internet, online commerce, energy, and the wider global economy.

Learn why, or miss one of the biggest opportunities in your life. Your loss if you choose to ignore it.


And apparently "Satoish" is going to become the most powerful person on earth because they hold ~5% of this deflationary "foundational" global currency/commodity/whatever it is.

That reason alone is why it will never happen.

I would work on saving for that ticket to Mars with Elon, there is more chance of starting a new crypto-bro society there than Bitcoin going to the moon on earth.


Satoshi only ever moved some Bitcoin a couple of times in the very beginning. Otherwise none of his confirmed Bitcoin has ever moved.

It's very likely that those funds are lost forever, but there's no way to ever confirm.

> I would work on saving for that ticket to Mars with Elon, there is more chance of starting a new crypto-bro society there than Bitcoin going to the moon on earth.

I'll take that bet.


It's Satoshi, and good luck on Mars, I'm sure Elon would be a great leader for you


I am not missing anything in life by not participating in a decentralised ponzi. I definitely get your motivation to keep finding new idiots to bring their real money in the game so grifters can unload their magic tokens for real cash.


> real cash

How much of that "real cash" is there right now? No one really knows.

How much of that "real cash" will there be in the future? No one knows.

What happens to the value of something when you can digitally create an infinite amount of it in a database at a central bank, controlled by a handful of bureaucrats?

Try to answer those questions with the smallest amount of intellectual honesty and I'll think you'll find the value of your "real cash" isn't based on very much.

Forget about Bitcoin and just answer those questions about fiat money.


You say Bitcoin is real money because it is limited in supply (artificially since it's essentially a variable defined in the code) so that makes it deflationary. Anything deflationary in nature can't be money. I won't explain basic economics to you. Go find out why. But then you act like Bitcoin is a security, a speculative asset because it's value will only go up in future (again thanks to limited supply).

Real cash is something that you can buy real goods and services with. Something that I can pay my bills with. You guys have a problem with central governments seemingly creating money out of thin air because you think it devalues your money. Your whole concept of money is wrong. You confuse money (a medium of exchange/short term store of value) with security (long term storage of value).

You know what gives money any value even if it is printed out of thin air? Trust. I trust that I can exchange that money for food, for a house, for clothes, a movie ticket, anything that I want. Where does that trust come from? That trust comes from the stability of the government, the law and order systems, the ability of the sovereign to protect its land and people with those guns and tanks. What gives Bitcoin a value? Nothing. If I cannot find a bigger fool to sell my Bitcoin, it's worthless.

Bitcoin is neither money (deflationary), nor a security (no inherent utility). This is plain truth. Other than a handful of crypto suckers everyone understands it. Hope you get this simple truth one day.


> You say Bitcoin is real money because it is limited in supply

The limited supply just makes it better money.

> (artificially since it's essentially a variable defined in the code)

Sure, anyone is free to change the necessary variables. It's open source code. Good luck getting everyone else to run nodes that use the changed code. That's the point of distributed consensus. You can change the rules all you want, but other nodes in the existing network will ignore you, creating a separate network. This kind of thing has already been tested with various hardforks and the blocksize war.

> Anything deflationary in nature can't be money. I won't explain basic economics to you. Go find out why.

There's nothing to say money has to be inflationary, except the 'rules' and theories that people have made up, like MMT. The current system is built around inflationary money, but that doesn't mean it had to be that way. It's just one way to operate an economy.

> But then you act like Bitcoin is a security, a speculative asset because it's value will only go up in future (again thanks to limited supply).

Currencies are speculative assets. That's what forex markets are for. People trade them against each other. Bitcoin is no different. It can be money and a speculative asset.

Also, your definition of a security is unclear. As far as the SEC is concerned it doesn't apply to Bitcoin as Gary Gensler has stated numerous times.

> Real cash is something that you can buy real goods and services with. Something that I can pay my bills with.

You can pay for real goods and services with Bitcoin, albeit in a limited capacity at the moment, but we're only 14 years into this experiement (less for the Lightning Network), which is VERY early for a new form of money... adoption and trust will take time i.e. decades.

> You guys have a problem with central governments seemingly creating money out of thin air because you think it devalues your money.

It does devalue your money. This is a fact. You can't deny that.

You can argue the virtues of inflationary money all you want, you could argue there are legitimate uses for that that type of money, but it comes at the cost of devaluing people's savings in cash. This entrenches generational poverty.

> Your whole concept of money is wrong. You confuse money (a medium of exchange/short term store of value) with security (long term storage of value).

No, I understand those concepts well.

> You know what gives money any value even if it is printed out of thin air? Trust.

This is literally Bitcoin 101.

"The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust."

https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/p2pfoundation/1/

"Trust" is mentioned by Satoshi 13 times in his short whitepaper.

> I trust that I can exchange that money for food, for a house, for clothes, a movie ticket, anything that I want. Where does that trust come from? That trust comes from the stability of the government, the law and order systems, the ability of the sovereign to protect its land and people with those guns and tanks.

You talk as though you think money requires government to exist. Money has spontaneously emerged in various societies throughout human history that didn't require a top-down central authority to enforce its use, the best of which was gold for thousands of years. Governments minted coins from gold, but people only used it because they trusted the underlying asset as something that would hold its value, regardless of who was in power.

> What gives Bitcoin a value?

It's digital money with credible scarcity that's global, permissionless, neutral, and open to everyone to use.

> If I cannot find a bigger fool to sell my Bitcoin, it's worthless.

Not looking to sell my Bitcoin, only spend it. There's a difference.

> Bitcoin is neither money (deflationary)

False.

> nor a security (no inherent utility)

You have no idea what you're talking about.

> This is plain truth

I guess if you say so it must be true. I guess I'll just have to... trust you?

> Hope you get this simple truth one day.

I will be fine thanks. Hope you see the simple truth I've seen.


> Cope


You will be doing that for the rest of your life as you watch Bitcoin's purchasing power rise against fiat's falling purchasing power.


Sure, make sure you never spend your Bitcoins because it will be more in value tomorrow. If you can buy 1 pizza today, you will be able to buy 10 pizzas next year. If it can buy one house today, it will be able to buy a mansion 5 years down the line. Wow, what a wonderful world it will be where nobody spends on anything because their magical Bitcoins will be worth more in future. What an amazing economy it will be. Nobody will work, everyone will just sit home and watch their Bitcoins go to moon and dream about what all they can purchase with their Bitcoins in future.

What are you planning to buy when a BTC hits a million worthless USD?


Yes... I'll never spend my Bitcoin. I'll just starve to death in a gutter as I watch my wealth sky rocket.


Distribution of Bitcoin has been happening for 15 years, because you can't live inside of a Bitcoin, and people need to survive. You don't understand economics if you think people will never spend their savings, when the time is right. I know I have diversified into real estate as a result, and continue to stack sats when I can.




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