this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
1597 points (97.2% liked)
Technology
59440 readers
3424 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
To me, the difference there is that the jokes about snake oil and homeopathy, healing crystals, or essential oils are roughly the same - e.g. "what do you call X that works and has been peer reviewed? Medicine."
So far, there has been no equivalent positive usage in the crypto sphere. Medicine, though often administered to different levels, is a good idea in itself.
Actually, for most uses of crypto it's attempting to muddle in and "add" value to a previous known-good thing. Is the comparison here that crypto is snake oil currency, snake oil databases, or snake oil contracts? In every case, to me, crypto is the snake oil salesman trying to sell you the brighter tomorrow - without adding anything positive, and often getting the heck out of dodge (or folding a company and moving on to, e.g. LLMs) before delivering on promises.
Now a days we peer review medicine. As I mentioned, in the "wild west". There's no peer reviewing. The metaphor of the wild west was also pointing out the infancy of a technology. Another example could be how the "self driving cars" aren't actually that self driving. However I suspect that over time even those cars will actually become peer reviewed, functional and what not.
The example that I saw that I liked the best was video games. Just because someone sells bad video games. Doesn't mean all video games are a scam. Ya, know?