this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
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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?