> it's relatively obvious that the critic doesn't have the perquisite knowledge to craft a critique that can be responded to easily.
Funny. My usual assumption is that if someone makes an argument that i don't have a comeback to, its that i am wrong. Typically lack of knowledge makes it easier, not harder to respond.
Hell, its things like this that make crypto sound like a cult. I.e. that the primary failure of doubters is that they haven't been suficiently indoctrinated and if they just let our lord and saviour satoshi into their heart they would see the light.
> The critic operates under the assumption of maybe 4/5 items are bad, and the defender is operating under the assumption that 4/100,000,000 are bad.
This isn't a numbers game. To show "crypto" is a good approach, you have to show some generic ideas that are useful in multiple contexts. Nobody cares how many failed projects there are. Its the successes that matter.
Right now you basically have "currencies" if i am being generous. Everything else is stuff that doesn't make sense and would have zero adoption if not for the massive hype train.
> If you assume the space has been fully searched, then its safe to stand back and critique. However, many folks conducting the search see much farther than you do, and see the entirely unexplored space as quite large.
I don't think anyone believes this.
If your position is that the crypto space is currently useless, but its possible that someone at some point may make a breakthrough which changes things, i think most critics would agree.
The breakthroughs that are needed to make things interesting are even pretty obvious. E.g. Efficient (much beyond the current generation) general purpose zero knowledge proofs of computation, efficient fully homomorphic encryption. If these things happen, i would find the space a much more interesting one. However these are hard problems - progress is being made but we are still nowhere close. Until then its not an interesting space.
Its sort of like if someone was doing things that required fast solutions to np complete problems, and countered criticism by saying we dont know that np!=p, maybe someone will find an algorithm. They are not wrong, but they aren't compelling either.
> a bunch of examples
Seem mostly about doing things you could just as easily do without blockchain. Except maybe helium which does sound like it has a story for why it needs to use these technologies.
> It's also worth noting that we _can't_ use S3, or traditional cloud hosting, which therefore adds a new metric for us to judge storage on: decentralization.
Genuinely curious - why not? Is it just for ideological reasons or is there an actual use case preventing you?