It's beginning:

-All US users can buy/hold/sell cryptocurrency on Paypal
-More crypto visas like binance card (swipe), coinbase card, MCO card, etc
-Huge bitcoin tram ad campaign by bitcoin suisse
-Jon Cunliffe from bank of England said "Banks will have to adjust to crypto"
-many more..

I already have friends who showed totally no interest before asking me how to use a ledger. I sense a paradigm shift coming. I used to feel either huge resistance or uninterest when I mention crypto to my friends. They were all so sure (Insert "Stop trying to make fetch happen" meme.)So I just kept it to myself, quietly invest, and read stuff.

Not sure why people always use dentists and hairdressers as an indicator of fomo... however are your friends/colleagues/family showing interest in cryptocurrencies?

Huge disinterest here. If it sounds to good to be true, it is.

I am actually working in the crypto area and even I am critical about it. Let me keep it simple: every time I went to an event (before COVID) on the topic was the agenda quite similar: first some tech guy gives the same “what’s a blockchain” speech, then the sponsor of the event gives the sales pitch of his product which usually either made no sense or was the 100th version of the same... then comes the gold rush part where people talk about crypto as an asset class.

1. I strongly believe in blockchain technology. It has thousands of use cases and can really add value in the way it works.
2. One of that use cases is crypto currency. I believe in it as well, but don’t believe that the current ones are here to stay. For the vast majority is a currency not an asset class, but a tool to pay stuff. I get all the philosophical ideas behind Bitcoin, but a vast majority of people don’t care about that. They care about the ease of use as well as how widely it is accepted. I own crypto, but in every day life can I not do much with it right now... as long as that doesn’t change is the idea dead in the water and all the speculation going on purely hot air. I have personally tried to convince shop owners to change their mind, they really could not care less about another payment terminal on their desk which nobody will use for years to come...
3. I have not seen the actual PayPal implementation but only read the announcements. It said that you can buy, convert and sell crypto. See what’s missing? You apparently can’t transfer it. A lot of bro banks like Revolut do the same. They treat crypto’s like a stock, not a currency. You don’t actually have an own crypto wallet, but a pseudo representation of one. I think that won’t help at all. And PayPal if all companies has no interest in people using Bitcoin instead of... PayPal.

In my eyes is the biggest breakthrough the various state sponsored crypto currencies that will be launched. It completely contradicts the philosophy of the original crypto people but the vast majority or normal people will trust an official e-Euro a lot more than some very abstract “thing” that’s popular with all the wrong types of people.

I personally find decentralized monetary system very interesting. I don't have the utopian fantasy, but we have to deal with the problem with printing money sooner or later.

Agreed, I also think the paypal thing is gonna be the same as revolut. Can't get it out of the system. And the current cryptos won't be the ones to stay in a long term. However still pretty good to spread awareness.

Although I don't understand a lot of it, I find it very interesting to read stuff like smart contracts, hashgraph, uniswap. I'm quite optimistic some abstract things won't stay abstract.

I use sort of a ledger system, blockchain to record antiques and art ownership so that provenance could be followed.
It is not abstract by any means.

I quite the like the idea of using ICOs to raise funds before an IPO. A way of investing in what seems like a good idea -and if it works, then the value goes up. If not, you lose your investment. But it has to be based on a good idea for me to interested. Not just a coin for coin's sake.

Huh! Why is printing money a problem and why fix something that isn´t broken?

Eventually it'll be inflationary.

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The idea of deliberately wasting electricity to provide security through cost is fundamentally wrong.

There are plenty of issues like the massive thefts that have happened from crypto exchanges and the fraudulent ICOs but they are possibly solvable.

Designing something apparently reliant on making global warming worse seems both harder to solve and badly out if step with what society needs just now.

The only use case I can see is cryptocurrency. I would be glad to hear of the next 2 most useful applications of blockchain.

The mining problem is not a crypto issue but very specific to Bitcoin. Plenty of other ideas around and in use. I don’t think the inventors of Bitcoin foresaw mining farms with thousands of GPUs...

Crypto exchanges getting hacked is a regulatory problem. There is a reason why this doesn’t happen to banks in too often... and that reason isn’t that hackers aren’t interested in banks.

Well to be clear it's an issue with any distributed ledger that uses Proof-of-Work to prevent hijacking the chain consensus with a relatively small number of workers.

I'd be interested to know if there are any cryptocurrencies that don't use mining and PoW as the mechanism for this - I'm not aware of any.

Some worked using proof-of-stake instead, but I think they're dying out and everything still going or starting up is PoW.

Systems using a trusted source for the ledger are much more efficient, but don't fit what most people think of as crypto (i.e. decentralised).

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Solution actually looking for a business problem!
And that means only blockchain can solve it!

It seems to have the worst of both worlds - only partially distributed but with a central controller, and still uses proof-of-work.

2. Contracts that cannot be invalidated by fraud.
3. Signatures that cannot be faked.
4. Identity that cannot be stolen or assumed by someone else.
5. Any type of ownership or provenance that cannot be faked.

It sounds like existing cryptographic signatures etc. can cover all of these without the need of a blockchain infrastructure.

As for #2, we have already seen with ethereum that ethereum contracts can be invalidated extra-judicially by ethereum developers!

The second largest cryptocurrency is Ethereum. Ethereum has recently started the process of changing from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.

The next major news item for cryptos will be when some central bank somewhere announces that they are buying bitcoin.