Question: How many idiots does it take to make a cryptocurrency succeed?
Answer: One extremely loud and charismatic mouthpiece.
I couldn't think of a good joke answer, maybe one of you can do better. Let me try again...
Answer: Two. One to make it, and a second person to share it with.
Hmm don't really know about that either...
Answer: Zero. Trick question. How can something worthless be successful?
The official answer of choice of the FUDsters.
Answer: It takes a nation.
My serious answer. It can be a country choosing to throw out their existing currency for it (cough looking at you, hyperinflation). Or simply the currency of the internet.
And what does it mean to be successful anyway? At what point can we say Bitcoin is a success? People buying houses with Bitcoin directly not enough? But yeah, one can't be declared a success until it is near-universally accepted. And by accepted, I mean that its existence is accepted and not ridiculed. Perhaps a suitable metric is the proportion of people that are adamantly dismissive of it.
Just for fun I've been keeping a locally tally of positions of the people around me. A great deal of them are dismissive, and very few of them are as enthusiastic as I am. But let's see my local tally... (This one is about general crypto sentiment)
Against: 1111111
Neutral: 111111
Pro: 1111
Just a rough idea, not meant to say anything other than what the people in my circles think. I'm thinking it's probably similar elsewhere but that's just a hunch.
And navigating around real life, people don't want to hear about cryptocurrency in general, and in a room with a bear and a bull, it's never productive, and I've been pondering why. I think at the end of the day, it's simply that we just don't know how it will pan out. But the reason it's so divisive is because in general each party thinks the other party is idiotic.
When I try to talk about these things, I have really one goal: plant the seed of doubt. And there are many stages of this to pass through.
"Bitcoin/cryptocurrencies have no intrinsic value."
Well, if the person is not willing to accept the parallel that the US dollar has no intrinsic value, there's no point in continuing. But if they talk about it being backed by laws and violence, kindly point them to a country where this obviously doesn't work / isn't working. And to its inevitable conclusion from historical cases of hyperinflation."Okay, Blockchains are cool, but they don't need a token."
This is an interesting one. In the absence of centralization, incentives are the mechanism for maintaining the infrastructure. And a token gives exactly that."Why decentralization?" This refers to points that centralized services work very well and already serve our needs. Also this refers to the slowness of IPFS, or lack of a use case that is "actually valuable". I think monetary systems are already pretty valuable, but they have not passed the test of time yet. At the end of the day, the value proposition of the blockchain is in its trustless nature, as well as an unprecedented level of transparency. This bears emphasizing because people tend to go off the rails about the potential of blockchains. (An aside: people say STEEM is centralized in many ways, and I won't dispute that. But the core protocol still satisfies a useful level of trustlessness and transparency)
"Okay fine, but it shouldn't be worth anything." I actually don't care what it's eventually worth. I'm waiting for it all to stabilize. But I definitely think it will be worth quite a bit, whichever one(s) "succeed". At least a fraction of the value of what each token hopes to replace, anyway.
Okay, I'm done talking with myself but these points above address a whole slew of items that I've heard from others over the past few months.
At the end of the day, I don't care if they are on board or not. I only care they get off their smug high horse and admit to the possibility that cryptocurrencies may survive. (Again: from "no way!" to "maybe...")
And to those that blindly yell "Moon!" "Lambo!" Maybe you need a reality check too. The advice continues to be not to invest more than you are afraid to lose, because who knows? Personally I think the reality is more likely to be "Mountain..." "BMW..."
If you got this far, cheers to you. Let me know what you think and if you got a better variant of the joke at the beginning. I'm feeling like giving some SBIs.