This is exactly the same attitude people got to Web3. So many scam tokens and rugpulls, they’re like “what are you gonna do? it’s the wild west.” Worse than that, when Celsius, FTX and other centralized companies imploded due to unsustainable and negligent practices many people were led to conflate that with Web3 blockchain smart contracts ecosystem.
The ironic part is that Bitcoin and Ethereum, altcoins like Filecoin and the entire space of decentralized protocols (EVM, the coming-soon FVM, etc) was designed to eliminate centralized middlemen, including banking cartels, Amazon (which is being sued for monopolistic practices) and the soon-to-come CBDCs etc. In fact, all the responsible protocols (IPFS, UniSwap on Ethereum, Aave marketplace etc etc.) kept humming along regardless of bull and bear markets. It’s just distributed code!
But middlemen were able to convince the public that their centralized companies “ARE web3” and then overpromised yields and other crap.And now the public conflates that with all decentralized protocols that carry value — that’s why we can’t have nice things.
And a bunch of fly-by-night teams cloned contracts delivering no utility at all and some even put backdoors in them. Like PHP “give me the spaghetti codes” crowd and Javascript script kiddies and HTML personal sites with <blink> tags script kiddies… but with some money invested.
Cryptographers were right to protest the word “crypto” being associated with this.
You are spot on with this; you don't need distributed systems and cryptography to run a fraudulent bank! Indeed, much of the 'trust' that comes with traditional financial institutions comes not from an inherent advantage in competence compared to cryptocurrency developers, but the fact that most national governments will bail out bank failures and reimburse vast sums of their citizens' losses.
If cryptocurrency-based financial instruments were regulated and protected to the same degree as traditional companies - but with the relevent technical competence to match! - I'm sure 'pay with ETH' and the like would be as common as PayPal and VISA.
The ironic part is that Bitcoin and Ethereum, altcoins like Filecoin and the entire space of decentralized protocols (EVM, the coming-soon FVM, etc) was designed to eliminate centralized middlemen, including banking cartels, Amazon (which is being sued for monopolistic practices) and the soon-to-come CBDCs etc. In fact, all the responsible protocols (IPFS, UniSwap on Ethereum, Aave marketplace etc etc.) kept humming along regardless of bull and bear markets. It’s just distributed code!
But middlemen were able to convince the public that their centralized companies “ARE web3” and then overpromised yields and other crap.And now the public conflates that with all decentralized protocols that carry value — that’s why we can’t have nice things.
And a bunch of fly-by-night teams cloned contracts delivering no utility at all and some even put backdoors in them. Like PHP “give me the spaghetti codes” crowd and Javascript script kiddies and HTML personal sites with <blink> tags script kiddies… but with some money invested.
Cryptographers were right to protest the word “crypto” being associated with this.