Most Johnly of HenriesThe largest harm of the cryptocurrency world, besides people losing money via scams (they're taking crazy bets and I don't have much sympathy), is that they vacuum energy and attention away from "regular" decentralization initiatives that simply want to distribute power away from monolith tech companies into the hands of ordinary developers and people, without also inventing crazy new economies and political systems in the process. You don't need a cryptocurrency to beat Twitter.
ThatWildCard@johnhenry maybe, and maybe they draw attention to how powerful decentralisation is. Personally I think the more people hear about systems being decentralised the more normalised decentralised 'everything' becomes.
See: @@johnhenry Isn't this the "your experiment takes energy away from mine" fallacy? Whose to say that experimenting with finance is "wasting time" that could be spent experimenting with microblogs (or the opposite) ?
@cjd Yeah, this is fair. I don't think it's a great harm, and different experiments are definitely good. The lottery / get rich quick angle is pretty pronounced in a lot of cryptocurrency advocation, and the benefits of "reduce reliance on centralized entities" is a broader goal worth pursuing independent of that. I'm still a fan of blockchain research in general, just wish there was more straightforward and honest discussion about it.
@johnhenry Yeah, there's quite a bit of that meme floating around, especially around the alt-coins. I'd like to think that in general the greedy people are financing research by losing their shirts.
Drew Wings ✅@johnhenry agreed and blockchain might be a way to add more security/authentication to the federated model so ppl can verify themselves across multiple instances.