You asked for some links and video. Here's a few on the side. Switch the prefix from "old." to "www." or back again for the links as you prefer for what you're reading them on.
I have some sympathy for these posters. It's hard to make a good argument without deeply understanding what you're talking about, and if you (correctly) are skeptical of crypto there's little reason to learn about it save a craven desire to make money. Out of these links the Gravel Institute is by far the best - crypto is a big speculative bubble and the rest doesn't really matter - but answers /u/Havanasyndromewaves's questions the least.
The second post tries to make a similar argument but gets bogged down in irrelevant details. It says that crypto has exchange value but no use value. Sure, but that's true of most financial assets. Quit explaining why crypto is a bad commodity, give a theory for how securities work, and explain how crypto is any different than a self-referential hype security like Tesla or GameStop. (And honestly, saying crypto is like those is already bad enough. We know those are bad investments.)
The first post is right about the broad strokes of crypto: it's generally not a useful technology in a world that already has centralized databases everywhere. But it's dead wrong whenever it gets technical, and IMO poorly defines the positions it's trying to debunk. Gish gallop type post, great quantity of poor arguments and rebuttals. Some notes:
First: Crypto is not an "asset". It's a token you hope to redeem for an actual asset.
This is a dumb sneer. Crypto is obviously an asset. It has a market price, you can buy and sell derivatives of it, trade it on margin or use it as collateral for a loan. It's not a "real asset" like land or commodities, it's a "financial asset" like stocks. If Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC were publicly traded, shares in the scam would be assets.
Blockchain has "smart contracts" - So-called "smart contracts" are neither innovative, nor very "smart". They're just a series of very limited IF-THEN statements that can be executed on blockchain transactions. A typical web server script is infinitely more smart and useful than a smart contract. Also, smart contracts are subject to the Oracle Problem.
Smart contracts are Turing complete, they're absolutely not limited to if-thens. They're ordinary computer programs executed in a big VM. The oracle problem is real, a big reason why most smart contracts are very limited in their interactions with the real world, and why crypto will probably have to give up the pretension of trustlessness to succeed.
Third, unlike 2FA, the design of blockchain actually makes it possible to fake ownership. Something much more difficult to do in non-blockchain scenarios. Here's an example. Using blockchain and smart contracts, it's possible to acquire an asset, use the asset for verification, then return the asset in a single transaction. So using blockchain for ownership/legitimacy is actually significantly less secure than most other methods.
This is a simple bug. Flash loans are a cool emergent feature that lets arbitrageurs do their thing without capital. The cost of a zero length, zero risk loan approaches 0. So much less capital is required to get a market working. This is generally good, you want to minimize the size of financial systems because they're basically vampires on the real economy.
The bored ape guys are IDIOTS for the way they did that distribution. Sniffing their own farts about NFTs being useful. Normal airdrops either directly send out the tokens or, if they want to pass gas costs onto the recipients, use a Merkle tree distributor or equivalent to do it based on a snapshot. If you insist on not doing a snapshot (probably to pump up the value of the NFTs) you should check the state from before the current transaction began, i.e. last block's balance. In 2022 only rank amateurs get got by flash loan attacks, we've known about them since like 2018 and the mitigations are not hard.
You asked for some links and video. Here's a few on the side. Switch the prefix from "old." to "www." or back again for the links as you prefer for what you're reading them on.
https://old.reddit.com/r/CryptoReality/comments/lq6xpq/the_defacto_list_of_cryptocurrencyblockchain/
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoReality/comments/pyn7c9/why_crypto_is_a_worse_more_volatile_and_more/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=CryptoReality&utm_content=t5_3xw8ak
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AAUrMuMPlo
I have some sympathy for these posters. It's hard to make a good argument without deeply understanding what you're talking about, and if you (correctly) are skeptical of crypto there's little reason to learn about it save a craven desire to make money. Out of these links the Gravel Institute is by far the best - crypto is a big speculative bubble and the rest doesn't really matter - but answers /u/Havanasyndromewaves's questions the least.
The second post tries to make a similar argument but gets bogged down in irrelevant details. It says that crypto has exchange value but no use value. Sure, but that's true of most financial assets. Quit explaining why crypto is a bad commodity, give a theory for how securities work, and explain how crypto is any different than a self-referential hype security like Tesla or GameStop. (And honestly, saying crypto is like those is already bad enough. We know those are bad investments.)
The first post is right about the broad strokes of crypto: it's generally not a useful technology in a world that already has centralized databases everywhere. But it's dead wrong whenever it gets technical, and IMO poorly defines the positions it's trying to debunk. Gish gallop type post, great quantity of poor arguments and rebuttals. Some notes:
This is a dumb sneer. Crypto is obviously an asset. It has a market price, you can buy and sell derivatives of it, trade it on margin or use it as collateral for a loan. It's not a "real asset" like land or commodities, it's a "financial asset" like stocks. If Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC were publicly traded, shares in the scam would be assets.
Smart contracts are Turing complete, they're absolutely not limited to if-thens. They're ordinary computer programs executed in a big VM. The oracle problem is real, a big reason why most smart contracts are very limited in their interactions with the real world, and why crypto will probably have to give up the pretension of trustlessness to succeed.
This is a simple bug. Flash loans are a cool emergent feature that lets arbitrageurs do their thing without capital. The cost of a zero length, zero risk loan approaches 0. So much less capital is required to get a market working. This is generally good, you want to minimize the size of financial systems because they're basically vampires on the real economy.
The bored ape guys are IDIOTS for the way they did that distribution. Sniffing their own farts about NFTs being useful. Normal airdrops either directly send out the tokens or, if they want to pass gas costs onto the recipients, use a Merkle tree distributor or equivalent to do it based on a snapshot. If you insist on not doing a snapshot (probably to pump up the value of the NFTs) you should check the state from before the current transaction began, i.e. last block's balance. In 2022 only rank amateurs get got by flash loan attacks, we've known about them since like 2018 and the mitigations are not hard.