I wasted years of my life in crypto

It's good to know everyone here is weary of crypto scams, but I don't see anyone accurately describing the significance of these technologies.

Bitcoin failed as a currency, and as that became realized, institutional investors pivoted to the "digital gold" scam, to keep people long, while they divest or hedge. The two reasons why it failed as a currency are transaction latency, and lack of fungibility. Transaction privacy is necessary for fungibility. Both of those are just technical problems; I predict that a distributed ledger currency with private transactions like Monero, but a faster consensus algorithm like Avalanche or Hedera will become popular in the next decade. It's likely to be an Ethereum L2.

That is just the currency aspect of distributed ledgers. It's just one use case that we don't yet have the technology to properly address. The exciting thing that distributed ledgers enable is cryptographic institutions. These technologies allow us to solve coordination problems more easily than ever before. Democracies, businesses, communities, projects can all be coordinated better and more honestly using distributed ledgers. It's not an overstatement to say that distributed ledgers are as big of an advancement for human coordination as democracy was.

If you've been soured on these technologies because most of the currencies built with them are scams, I would encourage you to learn about them as if they were just incredibly robust databases that even governments would struggle to take down. Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn't involve money.

> If you've been soured on these technologies because most of the currencies built with them are scams, I would encourage you to learn about them as if they were just incredibly robust databases that even governments would struggle to take down. Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn't involve money.

The problems with the technologies is that the "robust database" guarantee is often highly dependent on the currency mechanisms. They unfortunately go hand-in-hand.

Remove the currency from a blockchain and you have a merkle tree. (To be even further unfair, considering currencies in aggregate, blockchains are always a merkle tree. How many forks of Bitcoin are we up to now?)

Merkle trees are incredibly useful, and yes a sort of robust database. I use git every day, but I have to respect that git branches and git forks are real phenomena and coordination of branches/forks always a real ongoing concern when working with git. Not a lot of institutions want a "robust database" which is easily branched/forked. You still need a coordination engine to keep the tree a "chain" somehow. The currencies for better and a lot worse (given how many seem isomorphic to scams) are the coordination engine that still seems most (distributed/transactional/"robust") useful to making a "blockchain" out of a merkle tree.

> The problems with the technologies is that the "robust database" guarantee is often highly dependent on the currency mechanisms. They unfortunately go hand-in-hand.

I agree that economic incentives are important for robustness, but I don't agree with this use of the word "currency". The tokens have value in that they can be used to write to the ledger. That is the consumer aspect of the token, you can give it up in exchange for the ability to edit the ledger. The producer aspect of the token is that if you help participate in running the network, you can earn tokens, to edit the ledger yourself later. The tokens have to store value (ledger write access), and there needs to be a market for them, because the producers can't use them all themselves.

Just because something can store value, in this case the specific ability to write to the ledger, doesn't mean that thing is suitable as a currency. Copper ingots let you make cat6 cables, the are objectively valuable, but we don't use them as a currency. And as the world found out over the last decade, the distance from store of value to functioning currency is significant.

The store of value is sufficient to run the networks though, you don't need the tokens to work as a currency, and I think that has been empirically proven. The Ethereum mainnet is unlikely to disappear for a very long time, but Ethereum is also unlikely to ever be widely used as a currency.

The takeaway is that you should have as much of these tokens as you are likely to need for writing to the ledger. If you hold them in Coinbase and never use them to operate the ledger then you are participating in the speculative overvaluing of the tokens.