HOUSTON – NASA’s Research Entity on Technological Atrophy and Regressive Deployment (R.E.T.A.R.D.) working group has been studying the cryptocurrency industry since 2017 to understand how it has managed to get worse on a pace previously thought impossible.
Bergmon Scheiztelhoffer, chief of RETARD commented,
“53 years ago, we landed men on the moon on the first try. Today we can’t get one out of lower earth orbit. 13 years ago, Bitcoin could do instant peer-to-peer transactions almost for free. The fact that the experience is already worse in every possible way and has in no way improved is an impressive feat. It took us a lot longer to regress that far.”
RETARD hoped to unearth some secret sauce that allows crypto to be uniquely retrogressive. So far, contenders include Reddit, Twitter, and Greg Maxwell.
“We haven’t pinpointed it, but the fact that cryptocurrency went from a world-changing breakthrough anyone could use to pictures of ugly cartoons anyone can steal seems to correlate with high participation rates in social media, laser eyes in profile pictures, and the proliferation of accounts controlled by Gregory Maxwell.”
The backwards-moving trend is not limited to BTC. Ethereum and almost every other project seem engineered to be worse the more they are used. RETARD is looking for ways to implement these ideas into NASA spacecraft.
“If we can really understand the way the technology is designed to fail by succeeding, we could potentially be incapable of even exceeding 30,000 feet – the average altitude of a commercial airliner – within just a few years.“
Even niche chains like BSV that do not face the problem of positive adoption curves have seen notable retrogression.
“We explored simple tools like MoneyButton, and found that, inexplicably, the best version was the very first WordPress tips plugin. Since then, every single version and update has been a major step backwards and now it appears all 17 of the original users have vanished.”
The MoneyButton research did open some new insights, and RETARD is not ruling out the raising of venture capital as another potential source of technological devolution.
