The cryptocurrency bubble is strangling innovation?

When etherdelta deploys - they call a script of mine that calculates the md5 of their files in github and creates automatically a new version in Chrome Web Store.

I use my plugin whenever I visit etherdelta so I can be sure that their deployed version matches the one on github.com

The problem isn't cryptocurrency or fads. Its stupid investors spending money on stupid things. I mean, its fine, its their money and all. But obviously, if investors spent the money on more useful things, it'd be better innovation for everyone (and those investors would surely get better returns).

At the moment, we're in an "everything bubble" and people just don't know what to put their money into. Bonds have low yields, the stock market has a dangerously high P/E ratio, and everything in venture capitalism has the word blockchain in it (even Hooters and Long Island Ice Tea). I'm sure there are some smart investors out there who have figured out what is truly useful, but like the old rule says: 90% of everything is crap. And that includes investments...

Sure, I could create my own coin to use as an in-app currency for my project, but why? A coin is only worth what you can buy with it, and nobody is going to sell anything worthwhile with some random, in-app coin.

Even Bitcoin was just abandoned by Microsoft, because it's so overpriced you'd have to be insane to trade anything for it other than high-risk investment cash.

Until this bonkers hype cycle gets to the peak of productivity, the blockchain has no real world purpose other than as a shared database.

"Lightning Network" will really help the PoW coins too.

Over the past year I've seen a serious decline in early stage angel investment. I've talked to a lot of people who have said similar things. What I've heard and in some cases observed is that it's all going to crypto. All the people who would be making speculative angel investments are now buying into cryptocurrency coins and ICOs in the hopes of riding the bubble.

This is really awful for two reasons:

(1) Few if any of these ICO systems have any utility at all, while many early stage startups end up creating things of actual value. It represents a shift in investment from value creation to pure speculation.

(2) When -- not if, but when -- this bubble pops, a lot of that wealth that could have been used to fund angel investment will be vaporized. Yes most startups fail but at least angel funding tends to support attempts at value creation. In this case we're losing tons of money to support nothing but the burning of coal to heat the atmosphere.

Everything else this article says is spot on-- any value that could be present in cryptocurrency is being harmed by its relentless appreciation. Hyper-deflation is not a desirable characteristic in a currency.

I lived through the dot.com bubble and that one was much less vapid. Even though many startups were over-funded and speculation ran the stock market into crazy land, a lot of actual value did get created. In this case I see almost none.

This whole thing feel like a reductio ad absurdium of financial capitalism, which ironically is the system Bitcoin was created to replace.