Barry Diller says cryptocurrencies are a 'con'

Barry Diller says cryptocurrencies are a 'con'(cnbc.com)

28 points by edroche 5 years ago | 9 comments

I get the feeling that in a couple decades we're going to put them up there with asbestos and tetraethyl lead in terms of negative externalities.

nikanj 5 years ago | |

Or just up there with Beanie Babies as an investment vehicle

gengelbro 5 years ago | |

I live near a small airport with a lot of air traffic fueled by tetraethyl lead (avgas). So it seems society hasn't really caught up if it's a rich person's hobby.

randomhodler84 5 years ago | |

I think the absestos and TEL lawsuits of the future will be settled in Bitcoin.

tisFine 5 years ago |

Crypto would be more interesting if the networks offered federated compute capabilities.

Owning crypto would be akin to owning a certain amount of capacity to use the network to do work.

Similar to land to farm or build housing on. A foundation to build applications on.

As is it’s just another shiny thing to convert to real currency.

Also, keep in mind Barry Diller is hardly a non-biased voice.

Edit: My bad; I mean if the crypto traders saw it as more than a casino chip to trade for cash.

randomhodler84 5 years ago | |

That is the EVM (Eth, Bsc, Matic) model (spend token as gas to pay for transactions). The EOS model requires staking tokens for CPU and Network, and you must buy RAM (which is account storage) on the open market.

You have described the economic model of smart contract platform cryptocurrencies.

Even Nakamoto chains work the same way, you require previous UTXOs (unspent transaction output) in order to pay the fee to spend them. Owning bitcoin is the right to spend it, and hopefully all the fees required in order to spend it.

pc2g4d 5 years ago | |

Is Ethereum not this?

lxgr 5 years ago | |

There might be some interesting applications, but wouldn't all those applications be fully out in the open, both code and data?

Zero-knowledge proofs and whitebox cryptography can probably help, but both are a far cry from general purpose computing / programming models.

ykevinator3 5 years ago |

I'm not sure it's intentional