In defense of cryptocurrency

The Christmas lights number is a little deceptive because it is comparing instantaneous draw and not yearly consumption. When all (US) Christmas lights are on, it might very well be equal to the draw of Bitcoin or Argentina; on a yearly basis, it's about 2-5%, depending on what estimate you are using. Christmas lights just aren't on for more than a week or two each year, by and large, and usually only for a few hours of each of those days.

On a yearly basis, (US) Christmas lights use more electricity than Montenegro or El Salvador.

It doesn't say anything about the worthiness of Christmas lights, but it makes them a much smaller gain if you eliminated them.

Absolutely, the average user won't be looking at the contracts (and yes there will be exploits). All software is buggy, the open-ness just gives malicious users a path to find exploits (and also bug bounty hunters incentive to responsibly disclose). With traditional software, the attackers are often large actors and we may never hear about all the exploits.

But think about where faith is being placed in traditional software vs. decentralized software: with traditional software, you rely on a whistleblower inside the company, or a government agency to expose corruption, malpractice, maliciousness, noncompliance, or incompetence.

In a dapp, there are also knowledgeable watchdogs who are incentivized to expose scams/fraud, or report bugs (I'd wager there are more responsible disclosures in crypto than exploits by bad actors).

Knowledgable researchers keep casual users informed of developments, and give layperson explanations of how dapp works (and Cunningham's law dictates that they're likely to be called out if their explanation is incorrect).

Either way, people are placing their trust somewhere. Traditional applications basically rely a lot on "security by obscurity" which doesn't make them truly secure. And many users enjoy truly transparent applications.

The biggest problem with crypto for the average person is that it's incredibly hard to assess risk in order to develop risk-appropriate strategies and expectations for interacting with crypto. And it can also be hard to get a straight answer when discussing risks (good signals are surrounded by lots of noise). That's why I think that rather than writing off the industry as a whole, those of us who have more insight into the technology (and the risks) should be advising less technical participants to be incredibly cautious, not to approach crypto outside of the top two as an investment without incredible diligence etc. (though, like the author, I'm very much opposed to bitcoin due to proof of work)

Great. But let's agree that the opposite is also false.

Rather, a technology should be judged against its present merits. As an extreme example:

A: I have cancer - just a few months yet to live with the currently developed treatments.

B: That's actually not a problem because cancer treatments might get better in the future.

Should A feel great instead? No. The converse is that any technology can be accepted. Future merits or lack of future merits are simply not a justifiable measure by which a current technology should be judged. It's as absurd. Just as absurd as saying, "You should like natto today because some day natto might taste better."

> But think about where faith is being placed in traditional software vs. decentralized software: with traditional software, you rely on a whistleblower inside the company, or a government agency to expose corruption, malpractice, maliciousness, noncompliance, or incompetence.

Indeed.

> In a dapp, there are also knowledgeable watchdogs who are incentivized to expose scams/fraud, or report bugs

Indeed. Moreover, they are incentivised to actively seek out and exploit those bugs because there are literally no avenues of recourse.

> Traditional applications basically rely a lot on "security by obscurity"

No. No they don't.

> The biggest problem with crypto for the average person is that it's incredibly hard to assess risk in order to develop risk-appropriate strategies and expectations for interacting with crypto.

Indeed. Whereas with "traditional applications" you have anything from regulations to courts in case something goes wrong.

> those of us who have more insight into the technology (and the risks) should be advising less technical participants to be incredibly cautious

Yeah. Yeah. Those who actually have insight into technology clearly and openly call that almost all crypto projects are scams. And that "smart" "contracts" are neither smart nor contracts and run obscure code whose authors often don't know how it works.

The people who pretend to be knowledgable and advising post things like "I can look at the contracts and see " perpetuating the myth that this is true.

In an ideal world, things will be build to facilitate the trust, we don't have to trust any programmer at all.

The trust in put on the code itself which not one but all of us agreed upon. Today, we don't have the tools to allow people to actually understand it but it doesn't mean that we won't in the future. Abstraction layers will be built.

Of course this is an optimistic speculation. I'm personally not attached to crypto in anyways but I'm excited about innovative opportunities that it enabled.