Just because your reddit or hn had non tiny amount of posts about blockchain or nft, then it does not mean that there was real and significant push towards those in real world
There is huge world outside your twitters and reddits
Well, my concern started to grow when two things happened:
- My sister who is not in a tech field asked me how blockchain worked since she had heard about it
- A server at a restaurant was describing that they help people buy their first bitcoin as a side hustle.
So while every example may not permeate out of the echo chambers, there are some that are reasonably widespread.
They talk about Bitcoin on financial news shows, which lends it a huge amount of credibility. It's like if Jim Cramer has opinions about last night's Powerball numbers.
As someone working at a very large bank. I strongly disagree.
The bank spun up a new business to experiment with blockchain technology and went hard at it for several years until they recently sidelined those projects...
In favour of AI
The amount of internal hype across all areas of the business (especially in the tech areas of the business) with regards to AI has been frankly stunning to witness.
A lot of people like drugs, you want small amounts shipped to you by strangers, you need crypto. I've never tried it. But I've seen people on both sides (selling+shipping and buying) do it with acceptable success rates.
This is the one and only "big real world market" (not financial products, not lower tx costs, not governance issues) that crypto currency solved. Quite ingenious.
Partially. Legally, they use both USD and Bitcoin; but it wasn't really adopted by the population [1] (it doesn't help that they've been using USD since ~2000, which is relatively stable by latam standards). It was also much more a political endeavour by their president to promote neoliberal ideas rather than anything to do with blockchains per se.
Sure, the push in the real world was from the usual crowd of vendors & consultants & upper management who make buzzwords a thing. Totally unrelated to people grifting on online fora.
We have bitcoin ATMs in rural WI and I personally know a number of people (my own parents included) that have lost a significant amount of money to the cryptocurrency grift.
Just because your reddit or hn had non tiny amount of posts about blockchain or nft, then it does not mean that there was real and significant push towards those in real world
There is huge world outside your twitters and reddits