Just finished watching this. It was long, but seemed pretty comprehensive on a sociological, economic, and technical level, analyzing why they might have emerged (following the GFC), and the fundamental flaws and issues in how these systems work:
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This is a really good video. He makes a lot of little errors tho that really ground on me while watching it haha. But still broadly speaking I think he gave a good impression of the situation
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If you have time, could you explain some of the little errors that stood out to you? Interested in learning more! 😅
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thread of the bigger errors
1. he conflates mining and minting which are completely different things
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2. he said that mining is the process where nodes compete on who gets to validate the next block, but that's not correct, every full node in theory should validate every block, mining is when nodes compete on who gets to create the next block
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3. "these schemes around crypto tokens cannot create or destroy actual dollars, they can only shift them around" it's true that cryptos can't create new literal dollar bills because only the government can do that, but they can increase the m2 money supply
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(his underlying point was correct though, which was that cryptocurrencies can't be a source of infinite dollars, I don't think it's a very interesting point though because really what can? it's not a necessary component of any crypto-related claim I've ever heard)
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these are what I remember writing down for the first 30mins of the video (which is the only part I paid close attention to)
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Also some miscellaneous errors, like saying mortgage backed securities when he meant collateralized mortgage obligations
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still there's a ton of misinfo out there about crypto and he did a really good job. btw my source for all this is that my job protocol developer for a relatively large cryptocurrency
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Ah gotcha, thanks for that! It's a shame about those kind of mistakes, and I can definitely see how it would be annoying if you knew about that stuff! I'm still pretty amazed at how much breadth he managed to cover given how confusing the space is!
Another mistake that struck me was referring to Scuttlebutt as a blockchain. Which tbf is how it is described in the older docs, but it's as misleading as calling Git a blockchain. Again, on the whole it's a great video, but some mistakes were made.
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a couple of the big names of scuttlebutt are vocally anti-blockchain now too haha. I genuinely don’t think the average person should care about any of this stuff, if blockchains or cryptocurrencies take off ideally end users would have no idea that’s what they’re using