$625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network

> Buying a subscription to gay.com from Syria.

That is not a credible example. Here are some reasons:

1) Paying for porn? Paying for porn when the implication is that it's illegal and could get you in trouble? Who would do that?

2) Cryptocurrency isn't anonymous, and is usually highly traceable.

3) And even if it was anonymous, what good will it do when your DNS lookups will divulge you're looking at gay porn?

4) Oh, so now someone's supposed to be using some elaborate TOR/VPN setup in a repressive country, just so they can pay for porn?

5) What, exactly is the process for converting Syrian Pounds into cryptocurrency again?

6) etc.

> Your on the clock..

Why were you so confident in your non-credible example?

Very early in the bitcoin days, cryptocurrencies were pretty interesting because it was nerds playing with a new kind of distributed systems computational tool. "Hey, here's a way to create widely available data without trust! Neat, what can we do with that?"

But for the past several years, it's clear to me that the majority of people in crypto are excited about getting rich. They generally strike me as the exact same kind of people that would be prospecting in the Yukon in the 1800s. They don't care about geology in itself, they care about what they can sell the gold for.

Ultimately, those kinds of people are exploiters and extractors. They may generate wealth and some of it may flow outwards to others, but I personally find that they do produce little that has any real meaning. The wealth they produce might coincidentally get used for something meaningful, but even that's a crapshoot. No one remembers the name of the dude who found the biggest gold ingot and that's likely for good reason.

I don't think the early days of the web were similar. Yes, it was initially nerds and then there was a huge rush of people trying to get rich. But at least the ones trying to get rich were trying to get rich by making something useful to others. It felt less like a gold rush and more like the westward expansion. More farmers than miners. The web was a place to make new things and not simply a direct means to play financial games.

The crypto bros—despite spinning up lots of businesses and coins and pretty websites with fancy logos—ultimately aren't out to make anything that touches anyone's lives. Imagine if one day all of the money disappeared from crypto and all promise of any future money evaporated. You could still do all the same crypto stuff, there was just no hope of making a dime. The whole system would collapse overnight.

That's not true with the web. Sure, a lot of businesses wouldn't be able to afford to keep running, but many of the people making stuff on the web would do their best to keep making their stuff on the web, because it was more about the stuff itself than the money.

Axie Infinity is one of the shining stars of the cryptocurrency world, it's the game that'll change the world for the better by bringing people out of poverty... oh, wait, no, it's just another shit show. Whether they got hacked in this way or not, whether they used a blockchain or not, it wouldn't change the fundamental reality that Axie Infinity is a garbage fire, and that's why people are well-informed when they are dunking on cryptocurrency, because even in its purest most magical well used form, it's literally a database. A database!

The idea that Axie Infinity was great EXCEPT FOR the choice not to use a blockchain is so far from reality. I'd go as far as to say this hack is merciful and will finally bring an end to yet another bullshit, predatory project. The hacker has done the world a service, half-a-billion is a fair reward.

(I don't want to distract from my point that this is all bullshit, but in these parentheses I'll add that your point doesn't follow, because the fact that they use a side chain with centralised validators is immaterial. The hack happened because private keys were stolen, which is just as much of a vulnerability if this happened entirely on the main ethereum chain where acquiring the various private keys required to create a legitimate multi-signature is just as possible. You're assuming if they had "just" used a blockchain they would have magically been smart enough not to keep keys lying around where they could be misused... the key takeaway here is that a technology that can be party to a half-a-billion loss because someone was dumb is not good technology)