Oh what a perfect post in which to see all the absurdly emotional, dismissive, ridiculous crypto hate that this site's commentators just can't seem to stop grasping at rise to the surface.... A supposed "hacker" community filled with people who will reach for any convoluted reason they can to utterly sling shit at a whole complex range of technologies that despite its many bad uses has also proven to be a very interesting, impressively developed ecosystem that has also been used by many people in unique ways, often under adverse conditions that the privileged majority of HN readers never have to deal with.
But hey, let's just blanket claim that it's all a ponzi scheme (despite the definition of ponzi schemes being very clear and very different from the essentials of Bitcoin or Ethereum or many other cryptocurrencies). Or lets go on and on ad nauseum about the carbon burn of BTC and PoW mining (despite many of you working in tech fields where insane amounts of electrical energy and carbon are burned just maintaining billions of people's generally utterly pointless social media posts or cat videos).
Or how about endlessly sniping about fraud and money laundering on these systems, never mind that the wider financial world is filled with fraud on a far larger scale and that even social networks along with many other digital technologies are enormously used for exactly the same thing. Worth noting here again that there are actually many, many people in the world, people who aren't so nicely blessed by sound government landscapes, trustworthy or functional financial institutions and easy access to bank accounts who already do use crypto in many non-criminal ways (at least morally non-criminal). Anecdote, yes, but I personally know many who do this, and especially among people who I know in developing countries. I've read more than enough to know that the use is much wider than commonly reported. Even Chainalysis has estimated that only a small fraction of all crypto transactions are due to crime and fraud, and their very business is tracking the fraudulent use of crypto.
And finally, that it's useless because blockchains can be replaced by so many other things, or because DeFi sucks, or because transaction fees, or because "12 years later and there's barely a use case" and etc and etc... Since when does a technology have to be immediately useful and incredible to be interesting? Some of the sniping against blockchain's usefulness reminds me of the mentality behind those who criticized the Dropbox founder's original 2011 post on HN. Furthermore, have so many of you who make the argument about crypto going nowhere been completely blind to the amount of business exploration and experimentation that the wider ecosystem creates literally by the day? Sure, much of these experiments will fail, collapse or include plenty of fraud. So too have many other interesting and now robust technologies over the decades. Frankly, it's a shame to the very most basic idea of the word "hacker" that these negative arguments should be used to totally condemn something like considering how interestingly it's being explored in the wider world.
I could go on but what's the point? So much of the sniping here deviates so completely from legitimate, reasoned criticisms into irrationally, repetitively emotional hate that it's often like arguing at a brick wall.