Where are all the crypto use cases?
evanjconrad.comIf these are powerful use cases, you probably won't need to inform us about them; we'll all be using Filecoin instead of S3, or Radicle instead of Gitlab. Instead of "here are some popular use cases", you'll say "you rely on crypto every day, in order to access this structured knowledge graph thing everyone uses". If replacing S3 and Github are the strongest cases you can make, I'm dubious: I don't doubt there are people who really want to replace S3, but I very much do doubt that there's a critical mass of them.
The question being put to crypto isn't "can you come up with something that it can do"; it's "can you come up with something that will see mainstream use that eclipses the toxic speculation that's perceived to characterize every crypto application".
I don't claim to have a dispositive argument here, but I also don't think crypto advocates do either.
> “can you come up with something that will see mainstream use that eclipses the toxic speculation that's perceived to characterize every crypto application“
This is a far better question to put to crypto.
The article isn’t attempting to address that question though.
My bet is “yes”, at maybe 80% confidence. I would say it’s fairly difficult to see though, because speculative projects grow very quickly and dwarf “normal” projects, setting unrealistic comparisons.
Both crypto skeptics and crypto promoters tend to be blinded by candlestick graphs.
The total number of active wallets is still fairly small (a few million), and so a “non-speculative” project doesn’t “seem” like a major project when folks attempt to compare its market cap against speculative projects.
For example, Dark Forest is fairly popular, but isn’t explicitly a speculative project. And so few folks outside of crypto have heard of it.
Crypto suffers from the problem that the speculative parts are mainstream (or at least, are very well known about), but non-speculative use cases are not.
I think this problem is mostly solved by the bubble popping. Crypto-skeptics can pat themselves on the back for predicting the obvious, but may end up being wrong long term because they missed the relatively “small” non-speculative projects.
Another way to put it is that crypto, being specified as a protocol, is likely not to be the product(which is how it's promoted speculatively) but a feature of a product.
Like, HTTP isn't a product; but a web browser uses HTTP as a feature, and so do web servers. But they aren't the whole product either.
And the categorical error is that traditional finance sees its protocols as products, but they're actually on the road to commodified features. It's easy to "print new money" now, so that's not the part of the value chain that matters.
> Another way to put it is that crypto, being specified as a protocol, is likely not to be the product
I used to say to proponents of blockchain as an enabling tech, "show me a product that relies on blockchain tech but sells itself on its amazing problem-solving features, not on the word blockchain and not on the alleged value of its attached tokens"
I don't know that I've really seen such a thing yet. I stopped asking a couple of years ago I think. The few times I got a response I'd follow a link and go to a page singing the praises of a token and using the word blockchain liberally.
Here's a couple: Figure[0] provides financial services by abstracting blockchain in the backend. Koala[1] provides travel reinsurance products funded by crypto loans in the backend.
That is interesting.
But neither is anything particularly new at the consumer end, the only difference between Koala and any other company is that they're reliant on defi lending for their funding.
And the only thing blockchainy I can find about Figure is their crypto mortgage, which is an(other) collateralised loan scheme, and it's not in action yet. I notice it was supposed to launch in April with a 100% crypto-to-loan amount. I wonder if they've had to rethink it in light of the recent crash?
If their other products are somehow blockchain (and they might be, I can see they have some sort of proprietary blockchain going on) then firstly, yes, we’ll done to them for not crowing about it and putting the product first! But secondly, again I’m not really seeing a novelty here.
And I wonder what happens to companies like Koala in the current situation, a lot of DeFi lending platforms seem to have either collapsed or be on the brink.
But I guess “crowd-funded finance”
But if the speculative use cases dwarf the normal ones, won't their interests come first?
Why would I want to hitch my wagon to that star? What will happen if the speculation dies down and the ledger isn't so widely distributed anymore?
>But if the speculative use cases dwarf the normal ones, won't their interests come first?
They will initially but just as we saw the the early internet, a crash can wipe out the speculation pretty efficiently and what remains might actually be useful.
By the dot-com crash in 2000, there were a myriad of clear use cases for the Internet that normal people—those not particularly tech-savvy, and especially not those directly financially invested in Internet companies—used and recognized as very helpful.
Bitcoin has now been around for, what, 13 years? And aside from a very brief explosion of hype around NFTs that most people were fairly quickly able to recognize as nothing but more "greater fool" scams, most people not directly financially invested in blockchain projects either don't know or care blockchain exists, or see it as a bad thing.
It was interesting how quickly the cloud providers got rid of their block chain offerings.
Have they? It looks like Azure, AWS, and CloudFlare still have their blockchain services, and Google still maintains Ethereum-ETL. GCP made a big push into the space earlier this year with a dedicated team (but not much has come of that yet).
That’s what I get for not verifying headlines.
I don't know about the very early days, but since 1990 Internet adoption (globally) has only gone up.
Some stocks crashed, some specific sites went away, but the people involved just reorganized and made even more successful businesses.
If 50%+ of Internet users decided to disconnect that could cause some real problems.
Hasn't crypto adoption also generally only gone up? https://financesonline.com/number-of-blockchain-wallet-users...
We are talking about a hypothetical future where the speculation interest goes away.
The poster I was responding to thought that would make room for more pragmatic applications but I'm not so sure.
Which early internet crash event are you referring to?
The dot-com bubble that crashed circa 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
I'm not convinced that crypto is like the dot-com bubble. With the early web, its use cases were fairly clear and immediate. With crypto, the use cases remain unclear and speculative even after 13 years of hype and fanfare.
I definitely wouldn't have thought to call the 00's "early internet" but that's maybe just me :)
It was early web anyway. The first web browser was released in 1993, and the first version of Netscape was released in 1994.
> a “non-speculative” project doesn’t “seem” like a major project when folks attempt to compare its market cap against speculative projects.
What is a non-speculative project? How can you deter speculation? By maintaining a high supply inflation for a long time?
Crypto has exactly one such usecase.
Darknet markets. Lots of drugs and lots of illegal materials are bought and sold using crypto, like stolen cards and child porn.
So, “if you are child porn enthusiast, you are maybe using cryptocurrency” might be a valid usecase.
However I don’t know how prevalent crypto is in any of these. I haven’t read any studies on it, and they might be hard to do.
I don’t think any of the big drug cartels actually use cryptocurrency, for example, but I might be wrong.
i believe it's true, however i distinctly remember that france's ancestor to internet ( called "minitel") first use was prostitution related, yet it also spawned other usages like yellow pages and train reservations.
What's surprising about crypto however, is that this "second wave" of usages should already start to appear by now, and yet we don't see any sign of them.
I do not think people should confuse minitel rose (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel_rose) with prostitution. In one case, the victim is the prostitute, in the other case, it is the client.
Sure, i couldn't find a way to describe minitel rose in english so i went for prostitution. But it's clearly not, you're right.
The “second wave” of crypto uses are already present for those using these networks. For average mass market appeal, we will not see it until PoS and privacy enabled scalable L2s reach maturity.
Each product's value can be judged along many different dimensions. The fact that a product is not the top most used in a category does not mean that it is inferior along all dimensions. For example, many people here on HN would say that they prefer DuckDuckGo over Google because it doesn't track you in the same way. However it's not the number one product in the search engine category. It does, however, win along at least one dimension: privacy. So, if you value that then maybe DDG is for you. The same privacy argument could be made for protonmail, Tor, and Signal.
Just because something isn't AWS doesn't mean that it's useless. I think that's part of the point the OP was making: people keep moving the goal post and because of that, their argument is not falsifiable.
The ultimate test for a new crypto application would be to not mention anywhere that it uses crypto and completely abstract anything crypto-related away from users, then get millions of users because it does something truly useful.
Why does Uniswap need to replace all of our exchanges within a two year timespan in order to be seen as useful, novel, and interesting tech? When was the last time you applied this standard to the rest of our technology? HN can admit that Tor, Scuttlebutt, 3D printing, text-to-image GANs is interesting and useful tech, despite it not taking over average users daily lives.
The basic premises of crypto are to be decentralized and permissionless systems that support peer-to-peer forms of exchange and ownership, and they largely succeed in their defined goals. The goal of these protocols is to provide new tools, not to replace every corner of fiat and financial systems.
The key difference is negative externalities. If 3D printing and Scuttlebutt were associated with scams and crime, people in HN would Cann it useless too.
Notice that Tor was also in my list, and it powers the criminal dark web - driving a lot of negative externalities - but it is rarely called useless. HN crowd generally appreciates privacy, peer-to-peer systems, and end-to-end encryption, but does not apply the same standards when it comes to digital ownership and value exchange.
> to be decentralized and permissionless systems that support peer-to-peer forms of exchange and ownership, and they largely succeed in their defined goals.
They... they don't succeed. Like, at all. Except for a tiny bit in their own digital bubbles where everything is defined in crypto. And even there it's highly questionable.
Sure they do - these protocols define digital assets that can be owned in a non-custodial manner, and exchanged and escrowed via peer-to-peer mechanisms without fear of double-spend. These are the goals of the protocols, and both BTC and ETH have succeeded wildly at doing this specific task, facilitating billions of dollars worth of transfers for several years without any notable record of a double-spend or network downtime.
This says nothing about their USD spot trading price, or the practicality of securing large amounts of wealth with a 24-word private key, or the expectation that these technologies should somehow replace all corners of the world's financial transactions.
The number of people who want to replace S3 is far larger than the number of people who want to replace S3 with a crypto based solution.
Both are probably pretty small numbers.
I think self sovereign identity (ie, what Keybase did but standardized and anchored on a public blockchain rather than a private database) is an interesting consumer-facing technology that is crypto based and isn't a scam.
Identity plays are tricky commercially but there do seem to be some interesting shoots of growth around it.
I'm a broken record on why I believe this is a distinctively bad use case for public blockchains, for whatever it's worth. But it doesn't matter that I think this use case is doomed; what matters is: it's not a serious mainstream thing right now. If it becomes one, you won't have to argue; it'll be self-evidently an important use case.
Sorry to make you repeat yourself, but we’re looking at DIDs and I’d like to know your arguments against them. Do you mind linking to a comment or summarizing?
DIDs have nothing to do with blockchains, it's just that some people are trying to hype DIDs by artificially linking them with blockchains. They use "crypto" but the "old kind", the good one: cryptography.
While DIDs do not have to link to blockchains the standard itself notes:
Many—but not all—DID methods make use of distributed ledger technology (DLT) or some other form of decentralized network.[1]
I think it was this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29750165
Two words. Identity theft.
Could you elaborate a bit on that please? How would that pan out?
I went looking (!) and I found this comment[1] from you. To summarize:
> SSI has no human mediated account recovery and so is a toy.
I don't completely disagree, but it's not the take I was expecting.
Please explain what this is a bad use case. I'd love to learn why that is.
Because you can't remove stuff from a blockchain.
Change your name? Old name still there. Change your phone number? Still there. All old email addresses? Still there.
I reckon that's now how SSI solutions use a blockchain (or at least the ones I know of). AFAIK, a blockchain is only used to resolve a DID (an identifier mapping a random ID to a bunch of public keys you control, along with a URL to communicate with your device). Your personal information, as in your name, phone number, email stay in your device and are only exchanged with the party you want to authenticate against.
I'm curious to know if there's something I misunderstood in this space
Not the person you're responding to, but my view on this is: Having one online identity that is publicly viewable by everbody is a privacy nightmare. Yes, I know that it's pseudonymous, but it's possible for a sufficiently motivated entity to find out who is behind a pseudonym.
Zero-knowledge cryptography allows you to post opaque data to the blockchain and selectively reveal properties of it to chosen people and applications.
For example, a zero-knowledge DID can generate a proof to an age-restricted application that you are over 18, without necessarily revealing your birthdate or any other information about yourself.
And this is already covered by the DID/VC W3C specs that don’t need a blockchain. An age restriction in particular will _always require the blessing of a central party_.
Nah, SSI is interesting but it has absolutely 0 need for a blockchain. It's just another case of a solution looking for a problem.
The only reason anyone cares about blockchain is because of the ability to speculate. Remove that and it's a tiny niche tech - which certainly has use cases but nothing you can build a Facebook or Google around.
A blockchain also allows software programs to interact with each other in an uncensorable way, and ensures that those programs operate the way their source code says it does. It may be a niche technology, but I think these properties are useful for a bunch of types of apps.
It is kind of entertaining to see how many profiles on HN still have their keybase identity in them.
isnt that blockchain sovereign identity? its not you that owns your identity, its the blockchain and a private key.
it be nice to prove identity via a public key, but the private key can't be trusted as the authority. They get compromised too often
This is how urbit ids work for what it’s worth, I think it’s a good model.
Do you have a centralized solution for the Brave/BAT ecosystem? Not even Google checks the boxes. They won't pay you for viewing ads or protect your privacy.
What is even Brave/BAT ecosystem? The ask was for mainstream usecases, not some unknown acronyms.
https://brave.com/transparency/
* 60 million monthly active users
https://basicattentiontoken.org/growth/
* 10 million users opted into rewards
Brave pays users for their attention while blocking ads and tracking. Brave is not unknown on HN. There are a lot of posts about it that make the front page.
You need to remember that the entire crypto crowd (dev, preachers, fans, intellectuals, philosophers, gamblers, ...) are all a tiny, tiny minority on this planet. Tokens?? Are they some round plastic pieces given at fun rides? If they are so damn well-known, why is not a house-hold name such as amazon, netflix, facebook etc? Come out of your silly crypto rabbit hole and experience the real world.
> Filecoin - A commodity market for storage that's currently 0.0011% the cost of S3.
This actually proves that there isn't a real use case of Filecoin aside from speculation. Amazon isn't making 99.9989% profit margins on S3, nor is it possible for Filecoin to be a hundred thousand times more efficient than S3. This means that Filecoin's storage product is so uncompetitive that you need to subsidize it a hundred thousand times just to get people to use it.
> Toucan - Tradable Carbon Credits
All the other use cases listed look like parodies of crypto products with plenty of buzzwords, and no real substance. However, this one is especially nonsensical. From their website:
> Working with top DeFi protocols and the community we enable carbon credits to be used as collateral, yields and money, as well as a huge range of novel applications.
That's literally missing the point of buying carbon credits. The only use case for buying carbon credits to blackhole them immediately, so that you can feel like you're offsetting your emissions. There is no reason to resell them. Even if you did want to resell them because you overestimated your carbon footprint and have some left "unused", no buyer has any reason to believe you. If there is anything carbon credits need, it's more centralization and trust, not less.
Excellent relevant Wendover video about carbon credits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW3gaelBypY
> This actually proves that there isn't a real use case of Filecoin aside from speculation. Amazon isn't making 99.9989% profit margins on S3, nor is it possible for Filecoin to be a hundred thousand times more efficient than S3. This means that Filecoin's storage product is so uncompetitive that you need to subsidize it a hundred thousand times just to get people to use it.
A few months ago I tried for a couple hours to figure out how to get files onto the filecoin network and I could not make heads or tails of it. There were some services that used it as a backend, but that wasn't my goal and they had weird pricing too.
Wikipedia says "As of February 2022 the total storage capacity was 15.6EiB, and total data stored was 40 PiB."
Clearly something's wonky here if it's so cheap and so empty. Does anyone understand what's going on there?
For comparison I could mention something like Sia, which seems to be put together fine and comprehensibly, but the total size is single digit petabytes so it's completely irrelevant on a global scale.
Perhaps if you gave us some insight on what profit margins amazon is making on S3 and why you think so it would help us follow your thoughts. Just saying "pah, patently ridiculous" and then swiftly moving on is not something of use to anyone.
The link claims it costs $0.0000018 to store 1 GB for a year. Their data is 110 PiB, so the total revenue of their services is ~$200 a year. That's not even enough to buy a single enterprise hard drive.
This article seems like it's reaching. I don't think "money" accurately describes what cryptocurrency is because most people who use USD don't trade on the FOREX markets, but most cryptocurrency users are primarily focused on the exchange rate of BTC to USD, not it's functionality as a currency. It's better described as a security, and while it can be used as a medium of exchange its volatility can make that expensive or inconvenient.
As for this:
> Right now, you can take out a loan without involving a bank from one of the many crypto lending protocols. You put up some collateral and can take out a loan for extremely cheap, because there isn't a bank in the middle to take a cut.
The reason loans on the blockchain are cheap is not because there's no middle-man but because they're over-collateralized so there's no risk. One of the reasons the bank charges you interest is that they're taking a risk that you will not pay back the loan. AFAIK this is not possible in DeFi.
> Right now, you can take out a loan without involving a bank from one of the many crypto lending protocols. You put up some collateral and can take out a loan for extremely cheap, because there isn't a bank in the middle to take a cut.
"Loan" is a very misleading description of what this is. This is margin trading. A loan is when you post a non-liquid asset in the real world -- like a house -- as collateral. Margin trading is when you post a fairly liquid asset (like other cryptocurrencies) as collateral so that you can buy more cryptocurrencies. You can't use these "DeFi loans" to buy a house in the real world.
One reason I think DeFi is bullshit is because its critics describe what it does better than its advocates, who spout incoherent word salad.
> who spout incoherent word salad
I affectionally call it crypto-babble.
> critics describe what it does better than its advocates
Seems to be true of pretty much all crypto. Most of the advocates have a very poor understanding of how it works, what the benefits/tradeoffs are and worst of all a complete ignorance of the systems they are seeking to "replace".
As a result we see all the crypto stuff simply repeat mistakes/failures/weaknesses that have been known in financial systems for around a century or more in most cases.
Most of the discussion about HN is not about technicalities of smart contracts or block times or ledgers. The skeptics are interested in repeating the same lines but have a very poor understanding of how it works.
That is much less of a problem than the reverse scenario.
Being sceptical of something doesn't necessitate a strong understanding, being an advocate does, or at least should.
Remember the existing systems work and thus far crypto isn't offering anything new, just alternatives with different trade-offs. That places an awfully high burden of proof on any crypto advocate and such a bar is far from being reached.
> Remember the existing systems work and thus far crypto isn't offering anything new, just alternatives with different trade-offs. That places an awfully high burden of proof on any crypto advocate and such a bar is far from being reached.
No it doesn't. Crypto doesn't need to do anything better to succeed. It only needs to capture the imagination of the public. That's what terrifies the anti-crypto folks here and why they furiously post against crypto. You are powerless against this trend just like many were powerless when Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok started their domination of everyone's attention.
You can post collateral, borrow coins, convert to Fiat and spend the borrowed money on what you like. Sounds like a (collateralised) loan to me?
As a peer comment says, collaterlised lending is very popular in traditional finance to avoid taxable events and gain leverage.
There are plenty of critiques around Crypto but this isn’t one of them.
> avoid taxable events and gain leverage
This is a highly specialised use-case unlike a normal loan. And the collateral for this is as difficult to obtain as the cash you'd like to borrow in the first place. [EDIT: More difficult because the "loan" is over-collateralised!]
> There are plenty of critiques around Crypto but this isn’t one of them.
No. It's a perfectly good critique of how DeFi people abuse the word "loan".
Defi isn’t just bullshit as far as I know, it is an actual scam that wouldn’t be allowed at banks - I’m surprised regulators haven’t shut down Defi yet. Doesn’t everyone wonder why exchanges advertise interest at 10% - 20% on deposits and at the same time advertises 0.1% loans to others. These things can’t coexist at the same and no one questions the method. What I understand they do is take your deposit and essentially lend that same deposit out 100 times over in a chain of transactions and different cryptos to pay you back interest - and then like Celsius eventually fail. How can they loan out the same cash 100 times? As far as I know, they take control of the deposit - loan that to someone and take that someone’s crypto as collateral, and then loan that collateral out taking collateral from others again, then loan that out, and so on. This is possible in the ecosystem by going between several different cryptos that all allow them to “Defi” with themselves as well. Basically they only need a very small amount of deposits to create a crazy number of loans. I won’t claim to be in the industry but this was the best explanation I’ve received yet, from essentially a leaked, on how they make money.
> You can't use these "DeFi loans" to buy a house in the real world.
You can if the person selling the house agrees to accept the token (likely some form of stablecoin). Whether that matches your definition of 'real world' or not, these things have happened already. We will probably see less of this in the US, but I can imagine someone in another country gladly accepting tokens. I don't see why this is so far fetched at this point.
Accepting tokens isn't the issue. The issue is you can't put up the house you're going to buy as collateral for a DeFi loan. You need to have other crypto assets worth 1.5x or more than the house you're going to buy.
> The issue is you can't put up the house you're going to buy as collateral for a DeFi loan.
Of course not, you don't own it.
Do you understand what a mortgage is? You put up the house you're buying as collateral for a loan for the money you're using to buy the house.
Sorry, I guess my word timing sarcasm was missed. You kind of have to buy the house and get the mortgage at the same time. "going to buy" was said multiple times, which implies that the house wasn't purchased yet.
Well this is why having humans in the loop is an advantage, so you get an Agreement in Principle to move the process forward.
Also, we're back to the fundamental problem which is that you can't use a house as collateral on the blockchain but you can in the real world.
There are also things like leveraged buyouts of companies which operate on a similar principle. The capital for the buyout is fronted by a bank loan secured against the company being bought.
And again, there's no timing issue because humans can understand there isn't really a sequencing issue and one party isn't going to just disappear with the funds halfway through the process, and everything is reversible through banking and / or the courts.
> Also, we're back to the fundamental problem
Is it really a problem?
Just to be clear, are you being intentionally dense?
It's by far the most common type of loan a private citizen is likely to need. I want to buy an asset, I take a loan and use the money to buy the asset, if I don't repay the loan the creditor takes the asset.
I don't need to have 1.5x the value of the assets in anything to get such a loan. I just need to convince the creditor that (a) I am likely to eventually repay the loan, and (b) that the resale value of the asset will be sufficient to cover the loan if I don't pay.
If DeFi loans can't handle this scenario, as far as 99% of the population is concerned they're not loans at all.
> don't see why this is so far fetched at this point
Because you've fetched it far with "I can imagine someone gladly accepting tokens for a house"
I don't know how how many deals went through but there were ads in my country for buying houses with bitcoin [1]
[1] https://www.mercadolibre.com.ar/inmuebles/blog/propiedades-e...
I've seen many an advertisement for many a thing.
You mean like this?
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/02/greenwich-mansion-for-sale-w...
May 2? Before the fall of Bitcoin? Well, I doubt they will sell now
> You can't use these "DeFi loans" to buy a house in the real world.
Yes you can, the same way you can with stocks. But yes as you said, you need to have more crypto than the house is worth.
I know of people who have used lending protocols to borrow stablecoins, used a centralized exchange to convert those stables to fiat, and used that fiat to purchase things like cars and houses. As I understand it the reason they did this is they assumed it would avoid a taxable event?
I don't know exactly the tax situation, but with stocks it's very common that founders or wealthy people in general take loans against their stocks instead of selling, so there's probably good reasons.
It also allows them to stay long crypto.
"incoherent word salad" is a tautology... "word salad" is already incoherent.
What if it's a salad of incoherent words? :)
>You can't use these "DeFi loans" to buy a house in the real world.
Sure you can. Take out a loan, convert it to USD at an exchange, withdraw into your bank account, buy a house.
Only if you already had the money equivalent in the first place. Whatever you used as collateral will be something the other side would have gladly bought for the same amount. It's a speculative transaction between you and the other side that is completely unrelated to the house.
In real life, the collateral for the loan you use to buy a house is that house itself, something you did not own before (and arguably not before you are done paying back to mortgage).
This is typical of DeFi people. "Technically correct is the best kind of correct."
Your collateral would be other crypto. So it would:
- Be worth more than the house.
- Be completely virtual, so you can't use it to do anything in the real world.
- Be fairly liquid, as if it were already money.
- Be as difficult to obtain in the first place as the cash needed to buy a house without a loan. [EDIT: More difficult because of over-collateralisation!]
> Be completely virtual
Isn't all money completely virtual? Yes, of course there are physical notes, but those just represent the money
In physical world a collateral can be a car or house. In that case you continue using them while paying out the loan. In crypto world "loan" is a pretty pointless construct useful only for attracting clueless investors.
Loans do not need collateral, for example educational loans.
The Defi loan argument also discredits the argument that "crypto" is money. Why would I swap it for stablecoin, which presumably I swap for dollars which presumably I use to buy things if I could just buy things with "crypto"?
Either I can't actually buy things with "crypto" in the world where grown ups reside or I don't want to part with it because I see it as a speculative investment/gambling.
> One of the reasons the bank charges you interest is that they're taking a risk that you will not pay back the loan. AFAIK this is not possible in DeFi.
That's why there are options markets like, Nexus Mutual [1], that allow third parties to take on that risk.
Unless I'm missing something here, this is insurance, not lending.
Both products are lotteries with premiums.
They are categorically different. The issuer of an insurance policy does not bear risk upfront. Insurance policies are not collateralized.
> The reason loans on the blockchain are cheap is not because there's no middle-man but because they're over-collateralized so there's no risk.
You’re talking apples and oranges.
I think, given recent blowups, it could be related to limits on rehypothecation. But hard to know for sure.
> Crypto is successful at being money. If you don't believe me, then I'm happy to sell you the laptop I'm writing this on for 1,000 ETH instead of 1,000 USD.
Ford F-150s are successful at being money. If you don't believe me, then I'm happy to sell you the laptop I'm writing this on for 1,000 Ford F-150s instead of 1,000 USD.
The counter argument might be that Ford F-150s aren't particularly fungible.
A slightly stronger example might be gold, but people don't use gold as money anymore either.
Anything perceived to have a stable value, is fungible, and is easy to move can be used as money. Just look at prisons.
Gold stopped be used as money because people weren't really using it, they were using tokens pegged to it under a promise. That promise went away. Gold isn't exactly fungible (purity, fake gold etc), and it isn't easy to move in significant quantities. Gold makes for absolutely shit money in the 21st century
It’s not used for day-to-day transactions, but gold is still treated as a currency on the international level by nations that hold large strategic reserves.
The only reason they hold so much is that it still retains value as a currency.
The way things currently stand, if the fiat system falls apart, we’ll revert to gold. It’s the only viable alternative. Crypto might take over that role someday, in some form, but it has a long way to go.
Fungible + trades at greater than one usd also includes, for example, aapl shares. Still well short of the mark.
Well AAPL shares kind of are a form of money used to pay compensation to its workers.
I'm sure if trading or spending SPY was as easy as fiat, many people would sometimes prefer to pay or get paid with SPY instead of USD.
If you want to read my article, you can pay me 0.001 Nano (sub-second, 0 fee transaction), or you can pay me $0.001. Oh no wait, you can't pay me $0.001!
And paying you 0.001 in ETH or BTC will cost many orders of magnitude more than that in payment fees alone, and take massive amounts of time to vetify. Meanwhile the actual solution to this problem is micropayments, which can (and allegedly are) better implemented using traditional texhnologies
Why are you proposing solutions that work badly or might work in the future? I gave you a solution that works today.
Like I said: sub-second, 0 fee transactions (using Nano). Would love to see any of your traditional systems do better. Can you name one?
So I actually didn't know that nano was a specific currency. The problem is I now need to get nano which is yet another currency. I might as well pay you in yen, it's not something I have available by default. Why nano, and not Ethereum, or BTC, or USDC or litecoin? How many of these do I need?
> Can you name one? A SQL database of a random custom currency like any video game made in the last decade, or Faster Payments, both of which offer more for both the seller and buyer.
You're not paying tx fees for money transfers, you pay them for fraud, kyc, convenice of global networks. Those are features that are either hidden or not Present in cryptocurrencies
> 0 fee transactions
You'd have to check how sustainable this is, Uber was (is?) also very cheap in some areas, just because it's massively subsidized. A solution that works today but not tomorrow and burns cash in between is not necessarily something you want.
I get it that you are sceptical. But you probably haven't looked at how Nano works. It's 100% distributed and is battle tested in practice.
The biggest challenge they had was protecting against spam. But a few releases back they solved this issue. Technically a very strong project.
> you probably haven't looked at how Nano works
I have looked at the past n similar products and it was always the same story. At some point, you don't need to look at the implementation details anymore, you can take this from first principles: somebody somewhere is running a ledger. You have to pay this someone one way or another, unless they're just volunteering.
> a few releases back they solved this issue
How are they getting paid?
Regarding the ledger operators, from https://nano.org/faq#nodes:
> Instead, participants on the nano network are driven by external incentives, such as helping maintain an instant payment network they can use without fees.
So it does look like volunteering / donating computing resources, and the 0 transaction fee doesn't reflect the actual costs.
Lots of Open Source projects rely on volunteering one way or another. I think projects where everything is publicly available, have the least risk to disappear. If you want it, you can just run it.
There is of course always a cost for a transaction one way or another, but it still stands that you pay 0 for the transaction itself.
> Lots of Open Source projects rely on volunteering one way or another.
How many of them without any corporate backing have the same requirements as a payment processor?
> There is of course always a cost for a transaction one way or another, but it still stands that you pay 0 for the transaction itself.
Again that's not the full picture, just take the Uber example. If they had made rides free thanks to VC money, would you have said that they solved the taxi problem and made them free so it's a much better alternative?
The problem with this kind of accounting is that you can't tell whether it's just running at a loss or whether the technology is actually better than the rest. Visa and others could make transactions free if they didn't care about losses.
As a user, I'm also not interested in, say, getting a new credit card transacting in $crypto that will either not work anymore in a while once they've run out of money or start billing me fees when it's clear it's become unsustainable for them to have free transactions.
Ah come on, you can run a node for $20 a month, that's way cheaper for an entreprise than sharing revenue with a payment processor. Running a node is dirt cheap, because a transaction is dirt cheap at 0.000112 kWh per transaction.
https://blog.nano.org/how-to-run-a-node-and-why-a-full-nano-...
> you can run a node for $20 a month
So that's one more entry in your accounting, how many more are there? Once you've counted everything and implemented all the missing features (e.g. how much does it cost to do USD -> NANO -> NANO -> USD), do you still have something that costs less to run than a payment processor?
My only point is that "0 transaction fee so that's better than traditional solutions" is misleading, because of hidden costs, missing features, unknown regulatory risk, etc. The technical part and its efficiency is interesting, but just one variable in the equation, and not even one that major payment processors couldn't replicate at a whim if it did bring any value.
> Oh no wait, you can't pay me $0.001!
Plenty of settlement systems permit arbitrary precisions of dollars. It’s just useless for day to day purposes for most people, so a consumer version never took off.
As stated by Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment): "One problem that has prevented the emergence of micropayment systems is a need to keep costs for individual transactions low,[2] which is impractical when transacting such small sums[3] even if the transaction fee is just a few cents."
0 fee solves this issue. I don't see any traditional system that does the same or better than Nano to be honest.
But to do that I have to buy nano, and then you need to cash out nano to do anything useful with it.
Also frankly, if I'm paying as little as 0.001 Nano, then probably I don't actually care about your article and reading it is pure procrastination on my part, so I'm likely better off not doing so. Thanks for putting up your paywall :)
It's better to pay on demand than subscribe to 10 publications that each charge $9.95 a month. This is why streaming is a bad solution for the average person.
Is it? Have you surveyed the average person?
I’m not sure it is. With a subscription I know what my monthly bill will be and can budget around it. I’m fine with streaming, and very rarely pay for an episode or series of something.
Even if it was very small amounts, my watching habits would likely be curtailed if I knew everything I watch was going to cost me.
He misses the two main use cases, and the two things that crypto are used for that dwarfs everything else.
A) it's a great speculative asset. Huge volatility in value means fortunes can be made (and lost) in days not lifetimes. All those crypto ads on the radio talk about "investing" in Bitcoin - marketing it as an asset, not about using it as currency. It appears to be a zero sum game. I'll make no judgement about its actual value as an asset.
B) it makes illegal transactions safer by removing the need to be physically present to receive cash. This simplifies things like drug deals, and of course with digital goods makes things like ransomware possible.
Crypto already has two killer apps, it's just not the killer apps they wanted it to be.
Case A can also be achieved with straight forward gambling.
I agree that the second case, illegal transactions in any form, is the only real killer app for crypto.
Adding to B, it's also great for money laundering and avoiding sanctions.
If you are a Russian oligarch, it's great for being able to pay your superyacht crew.
I suppose, but is it that much better than cash?
I guess that depends. Would you accept payment in rubles right now?
Yep, this.
"useful"
and
"no use case"
are not the same thing.
Clearly anyone who isn't completely blind can see that you can use crypto for some things. It's pretty easy to demolish the strawman that is 'there is nothing to can use that for'.
...but given that technically it's like an unregulated, very slow, very expensive payment system, it's far harder to swallow the idea that it has compelling use cases, by which I mean, "I would be convinced to use this" unless:
- you are doing something that is illegal
- you're doing something traditional payment providers don't allow
- you want to avoid taxes / tariffs (see, doing something illegal)
- you want to avoid the red tape to do something (eg. banking, coin offering)
- you're speculating
Otherwise, you can just using something else, that is faster, simpler, cheaper and safer (ie. legal protections, etc.).
Many of the 'novel' ideas in crypto like asserting ownership via NFTs, smart contracts, etc. are not fundamentally restricted to crypto; you could run them centralized, and it would make almost no difference at all. You'd still have a CoinSpace wallet that you convert USD to CoinTokens on, and upload your smart contracts to.
The crypto part of this is not compelling, it's just a pain in the ass to deal with, technically, and commercially toxic by association with bad actors.
On top of that, the crypto is fundamentally worthless unless you have people who want to buy it, so it is in bad faith that most crypto proponents advocate for it; it is in their interests, not yours, to be involved with it.
> - you want to avoid taxes / tariffs (see, doing something illegal)
Which is basically impossible. It's a distributed ledger and the IRS has chain analysis software.
> - you're doing something traditional payment providers don't allow
So no one has ever complained about Paypal? Seems to be a recurring theme on HN.
> - you're speculating
Which is exactly about Y Combinator is about?
I personally think Uber and Facebook are scams. Uber ignored regulation and started its business without getting permission. Facebook tries to convince young people to spend more of their time doing worthless things. And yet a lot of people here are being paid big bucks by these companies and loving it!
The modern internet is just a cess pool. Crypto skeptics want us to believe that everything else on the internet that came before it has a purpose and is justified. But really the modern internet is making society worse.
I paid a contractor in Vietnam to do a side project for me once in a stablecoin. Because it avoided the central bank, they could avoid the stealing of their hard currency via the standard international payment system.
One beneficial use case from the US perspective is further global dominance of USD (if you are into that sort of thing). This limits the ability of corrupt governments from inflating their fiat, which is generally a worse currency than USD fiat.
> Because it avoided the central bank, they could avoid the stealing of their hard currency via the standard international payment system.
How much was paid in fees in total, from your currency to theirs (I assume VND)? If it's a USD stablecoin, I assume they still had to convert it to VND, or at least they'd have to if they were paid mostly like this (to pay their taxes).
Wise and others are quite cheap for the currencies they support.
I’m extremely deep in this space, so I will provide some more anecdotes.
A lot of the Chinese crypto engineers (of which there are many) are paid in USDT. This avoids all of the capital controls and knowledge the state has. There is an entire subculture of Chinese who operate their businesses in USDT, mostly digital ones but it has bled into the physical world as well. In Hong Kong duffel bags full of paper currency would be swapped for USDT by various money changers.
A lot of people look at crypto and see what’s on the surface. The easy, instant movement of essentially unlimited money without government oversight and intervention is scaring many authoritarian governments. See the total ban on crypto by the Chinese dictatorship.
> This avoids all of the capital controls and knowledge the state has
So. Illegal movement of money.
> Illegal movement of money
Which covers use-cases like sending money for medicine to your sick grandmother in Iran.
Not all laws are just and a world were no laws could be broken would be a nightmare.
The Chinese government has committed horrible atrocities. The US government to this day has people locked for life in prison because they sold marijuana for the third time and were sentenced to life.
Prior governments worldwide sanctioned human slavery and collected taxes on slave sales.
You say illegal - but I say immoral
I'm quite far from defending the chinese government,but your whole thread seems to be an incentive for tax evasion "because the government commits horrible atrocities". Governments are not "moral" or "immoral" - they are amoral. Their purpose (when they are good) isn't to improve conditions for everyone, just their citizens. And if that comes at a cost to other citizens in other countries, they are still within their mission's scope.
Projecting your own opinion on morality or legitimacy doesn't change the fact that taxes need to be paid, and in fact dictatorial regimes tend to frown upon tax evasion, so your opinion may also contribute to the increase of "people locked for life" just because they took you seriously. So, in some way, these stances actually contribute to the worsening of the issue.
The reason someone in Vietnam, China, or any other country with terrible government would dare dream of being paid to do graphic design without the government tracking such a payment is not simply about tax evasion. You might be helping to promote abortion. Or gay rights. Or liberal democracy.
There are innumerable reasons why someone in an authoritarian regime would prefer to earn a living outside the political apparatus, which in the current official monetary system is impossible.
"You might be helping to promote abortion. Or gay rights. Or liberal democracy." - right, because eg. abortion is illegal only on "authoritarian regimes". So basically, we're back to the initial argument - cryptocurrencies are good to sponsor criminal/illegal activities - being promoting democracy values on authoritarian regimes or moving money around in human slave trafficking...
It’s highly unlikely the people facilitating illegal money movement and exchange are morally clean which seems to be your criteria here.
What a ridiculous argument for tax evasion. Your tax money also supports elderly care, orphanages and a range of essential services that you have already benefited from. What you are doing is immoral - freeloading.
I didn’t realize promoting free speech, which would get you arrested and potentially murdered in China, meant you were an immoral person.
But with absolute government control over the payment rails, such activism is impossible without a sword over your neck.
Aren't North Korean Hackers using crypto for ransomware? So actually, crypto is used to finance and prop-up such dictatorial governments.
Also, Russia is being sanctioned through freezing their USD accounts and imposing financial sanctions such as suspension from using SWIFT.
If crypto is more wide-spread, then it will become more difficult to impose such financial restrictions to Russia and other international pariahs.
Aren't drug dealers in the US and Europe using paper currency? Shouldn't we outlaw that so the government can track everything?
The previous argument was that crypto will be a bane to authoritarian governments; I'm just pointing out that crypto can also assist authoritarian governments.
I never said to outlaw crypto or paper currency but I just brought-up that crypto is just a tool that can be used against and for such governments.
Yeah, North Korean hackers steal money on the internet. You are right about that.
And what do those people do to interact with their local community. Eg how do they pay their supermarket bill? Their taxes? (Well I guess they will conveniently forget about income taxes.)
That’s what the involvement if a central bank/state gives you.
The entire thesis of this article is nonsense. He sets up a strawman to knock down.
When people say “there are no use cases for crypto,” they’re actually saying “there are no use cases that aren’t solved better elsewhere.” This is the question he needs to answer and he doesn’t do so.
Looking at the money example, he says he’ll sell his laptop for Etherium. That’s fine but if nobody is willing to buy it with Etherium, he can’t sell his laptop and Etherium is de facto not being used for money.
Because he always skips this crucial last part, he never proves his argument.
The statement always takes the form: there are no use cases that aren’t better solved by (some centralized company). The goal of crypto is to avoid that last part, and solve some of these problems without the need to place trust and lock value into a single entity.
Uniswap as the author mentioned is a good example, in that it provides an exchange that allows users to trade tokens without reliance on a central company like Coinbase. This allows users to hold and exchange USD pegged assets like USDC and DAI in a non custodial fashion, and also take part in defining, improving, and even forking the Uniswap protocol if they want to, as it is not privately owned.
> The statement always takes the form: there are no use cases that aren’t better solved by (some centralized company).
2 things:
1. No it doesn’t.
2. Nobody cares.
“Centralised” isn’t a problem. If it causes problems you need to demonstrate that and then show how blockchain solves that problem and how existing solutions can’t. I’ve seen no examples of that (Uniswap isn’t an example).
> No it doesn’t.
This statement verbatim is regularly repeated on HN - users pointing to Stripe, PayPal, Venmo, Apple, whatever as being better solutions than the proposed crypto/web3 ideas.
> “Centralised” isn’t a problem.
Not for you, maybe.
Some users will be happy to manage the additional complexity and risks of handling non-custodial assets on Ethereum L2s in order to achieve lower fees and take-rates, privacy preservation, censorship resistance, and programmable composability.
A very simple example is a domain name. Outside of blockchain networks, we have no mechanism for non-custodial ownership and peer-to-peer transfer of a domain name asset - like you would exchange cash where two parties simply swap the bills directly without the need for a third-party to oversee the exchange and potentially extract rent.
> A very simple example is a domain name. Outside of blockchain networks, we have no mechanism for non-custodial ownership and peer-to-peer transfer of a domain name asset - like you would exchange cash where two parties simply swap the bills directly without the need for a third-party to oversee the exchange and potentially extract rent.
Prove it’s a problem
User Alice and Bob want to swap domain names they own, but using an escrow to facilitate the trade safely and mitigate counterparty risk - and they want to do this instantly, without sharing private data online, and without paying a % commission to a rent extracting corporate third party entity.
Blockchain enables this use case, for a small fixed fee that is directed to users upholding the protocol - which may include Alice and Bob themselves as token holders and block producers.
This is the strawman-iest strawman I've seen in a long time. By this logic, there's a use case for getting stabbed in a back alley. Some people need surgery, after all.
The proper question is what does cryptocurrency do better than alternatives? On the whole... I think bypassing financial controls to enable ransomware is not an improvement on the previous system.
BTC offers censorship resistant money.
And I'm saying that enabling ransomware is actually doing worse than the alternatives. It turns out censorship of transactions has value.
malware enables ransomware: the root of the problem isn't payment. the root of the problem is the widespread insecurity of modern computer systems.
You could just as equally blame cash for enabling robberies and conventional ransoms. Should the government step in to censor all cash transactions?
Yes. As an example, in Portugal it is forbidden to perform cash payments above 3.000 Eur. Also, inter-bank transfers above a certain value may require documentation demonstrating they are legitimate. Every country you see pushing electronic payments is already censoring cash transactions, as a way of curb the parallel economy and tax evasion.
> The proper question is what does cryptocurrency do better than alternatives?
Bitcoin, as one example, does a better job limiting supply and preventing inflation than its fiat alternatives.
Of course, this doesn't make the article any less of a strawman.
> Bitcoin, as one example, does a better job limiting supply and preventing inflation than its fiat alternatives.
You assume that's a plus, but most of the world acts on the opposite assumption, i.e. NAIRU-like policies. I'm not picking a side, just pointing out that you disagree with almost every expert on the planet.
> I'm not picking a side, just pointing out that you disagree with almost every expert on the planet.
The beauty of crypto is that if you don't like this feature of crypto, you don't have to use it.
Everyone gets what they want! The "experts" who prefer inflationary currency can keep using that, and people who don't want their money inflated can choose otherwise.
What was the price of a gallon of gas in BTC 6 months ago vs now? Inflation proof, you say?
Or... there are reasons nobody does that.
You do realize deflationary "currency" disincentivizes spending, right?
> Or... there are reasons nobody does that.
Like I said, the great part about crypto is that if you have personal reasons to prefer inflationary currencies you can feel free to use those instead.
And those who don't want their money inflated away, are free to choose otherwise.
Everyone wins! You can prefer inflation for your own money as much as you want. And those who don't want inflation for their own money, can choose differently.
> personal reasons
You seem confused. Societal collapsing vs. non-societal collapsing currencies are not "personal." You're confounding preference and outcome. Deflationary "money" isn't money, which is exactly what we see in all of your experiments, exactly as predicted.
> Deflationary "money" isn't money, which is exactly what we see in all of your experiments, exactly as predicted.
You can call it whatever you want, but the point is that you don't have to use this "deflationary money, which isn't money", and other people who do want this deflationary aspect of their money can use it though.
You can simply use your inflationary money that goes down in value, if you don't want to use deflationary "fake money", and people who instead want deflation in their "fake money", can use it because thats what those people choose to do.
"a plus" depends on who you are. For someone who profits off of inflation, its certainly not a plus. I said it does a better job limiting supply and preventing inflation and that is a fact not an assumption. The supply has been controlled, the only inflation is caused by demand, exactly as intended. Any so-called "expert" who disagrees with that should have their expertise called into question.
If you define inflation as the devaluing of the currency, it doesn't really.... The mechanism by which a currency loses value matters little.
I agree with that definition of inflation, so how hasn't it prevented inflation? Has the supply of bitcoins ever deviated from the intended rate? If it hasn't deviated from that rate then the supply, and thus the involuntary component of inflation, has been successfully kept under control.
I really wanted to agree but none of these claims really stand up to scrutiny in my opinion.
> Few technologies have a clear start point. Did the internet start in Tim Berners-Lee in 1990? Or in 1982 with TCP/IP? Or in the 1970's with CYCLADES? Or in 1969 with ARPANET? Or in 1965 with the invention of packet switching? Or in 1950's with time-sharing?
No, the web started in 1989 with Berners-Lee’s original proposal. The internet started in 1983 with TCP/IP (the Internet Protocol) being used for ARPANET. These are common, widely cited timeframes.
> Can you distinguish the internet from computers or information theory?
Yes, the internet is a network of networks made up of computers. A computer is not the internet. Information theory is the theoretical study of information and entropy started by Claude Shannon.
> If you don't believe me, then I'm happy to sell you the laptop I'm writing this on for 1,000 ETH instead of 1,000 USD.
Great, I’ll help you move house for a pizza, but that doesn’t make pizza money. The fact of the matter is, I can’t buy hardly anything with cryptocurrency except other cryptocurrencies. This is made more difficult even for companies that want to offer goods for crypto by the fact there is no stable exchange rate to USD.
> Right now, you can take out a loan without involving a bank from one of the many crypto lending protocols.
Lol, was this written before or after the collapse of Luna, Three Arrow Capital, and Celsius? Not to mention the numerous bridge hacks. I guess technically, sure, this is a valid (ie possible) use case of crypto, but not a strong one.
> You may point to hacks
I would argue a malfunctioning lending protocol is as good as no lending protocol, but again, this is a matter of opinion.
> Filecoin
Interesting use case for sure, but unfortunately it seems difficult to participate (and I initially had interest in doing so). IPFS is much further along development-wise. You may say “oh well this is still a use case of crypto” but… not really. I mean sure I can get paid in $FIL but if $FIL is useless in the real world (basically my earlier critique that it is not money) then why would I want to get paid in it?
Overall, I want to agree and perhaps it’s just a couple years too early, but as of now, this is too strong of a claim to make, or at least too weak of an argument to support it.
> > Right now, you can take out a loan without involving a bank from one of the many crypto lending protocols.
> Lol, was this written before or after the collapse of Luna, Three Arrow Capital, and Celsius
These have about as much to do with decentralized lending as Citadel and JP Morgan have to do with point of sale payment processing
> cheap loans
a loan that might double in the amount of fiat you have to pay back isn’t cheap, it’s nuts. Also there’s significant cost converting to and from fiat to take it out
> filecoin
https://randomoracle.wordpress.com/2019/12/07/filecoin-storj...
> LabDAO Toucan Golden.xyz
Why not just a centralised database though?
> Radicle.xyz
OK sure, if you have code that GitHub won’t accept, then this looks ok, but presumably it either has a mechanism to stop CSAM on it, at which point it can also be censored, or the Feds are coming for you if you run a node…
> Helium - Incentivization layer for the LoRaWAN network
Some kind of payment mechanism for sharing Wi-Fi? I didn’t have time to dig deep enough, but almost certainly a centralised authority would work better because it almost always does
> NFTs
Better handled by a central authority, and looks like OpenSea is already acting as one re stolen apes etc
> A blockchain is not a database … A blockchain is an escrow without a third party
And the lack of use-cases for that is the reason there are so few use-cases for blockchain
> Also there’s significant cost converting to and from fiat to take it out
No there's not. Trades on exchanges are under 0.1% [1]. ERC20 tokens have some fees because of gas but it's a flat amount [2], which is negligible for any operation over a thousand dollars. Fiat withdrawals are generally free [3]. The most expensive part usually is the gas to interact with the DeFi smart contract, but it's also a flat fee.
[1] https://help.ftx.com/hc/en-us/articles/360024479432-Fees
[2] https://etherscan.io/gastracker 0.75USD as of now, but it can reach like 10USD when the network is congested.
[3] https://help.ftx.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043023772-Depositi...
> Trades on exchanges are under 0.1%
Let's say I am the type of person who needs a cheap loan, and I decide to use Coinbase. My understanding is that money into Coinbase and money out of Coinbase is going to cost me 1.49% (at least) in each direction, and that's before the additional $1-$10 gas fees in each direction. So 3% + currency risks + whatever other fees + the risk of fat-fingering my crypto and losing it to the ether forever, and also trying to figure out if I have some kind of tax liability, BEFORE the actual interest rate itself.
Or I choose a well-regulated provider to do a money-transfer[0] to and pay a one-off fee of 3-4% for several thousand pounds for a year or longer loan, even if my credit isn't perfect, and I do that with the full protection of the legal system, including bankruptcy protection, easy resolution if I type the wrong account number in, etc. Those are the rates for if I need cash too, if the thing I need to pay for can be paid for by credit-card, the rate falls to closer to 2%...
[0] https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/credit-cards/money-transfe...
Coinbase is basically a noob trap. By adding the pro word alone (using pro.coinbase.com) you get like an order of magnitude cheaper fees already.
I already provided sources for the fees with another exchange.
> negligible for any operation over a thousand dollars.
So, useless on a day to day use for any normal person that's not a Silicon Valley tech bro, understood.
The topic was about loans. How often do you need a loan for under 1k dollars?
Extremely often if you're not wealthy? Borrowing money from family to pay for car repairs, from friends for various purchases, from your bank whenever there's even a little thing you hadn't expected and you do not have money aside.
Which is, you know, 90+% of the world
Excellent article for once.
Another one is decentralized compute.
AWS pioneered taking unused compute and commoditizing it. Well, there is a lot of unused compute in the world and building ways to take advantage of it is part of what I see 'web3' as being about.
PoW mining, however "wasteful", is still a great example of allowing anyone to effectively participate in the validation of transactions and getting rewarded for doing so. If you think of miners as a business, the 'customers' for miners are people submitting transactions, yet these business don't actually 'know' their customer at all. That's web3 decentralization (not silly NFTs).
Protocols like Akash allow anyone to effectively run K8S on their own infrastructure and get paid to do so... all the while, decentralizing the compute away from central locations like AWS / GCP. I personally find that concept fascinating and super cool.
Crypto isn't required for this. It doesn't even help.
That's your personal opinion, but you're not helping the discourse by answering 'why' it isn't required or even help.
Let's step outside of the box for a moment. If I'm in some other country and I don't have easy access to a credit card and I want to build out the next cool idea, how do I get access to scalable compute?
If you are a starter, how do you buy crypto without credit card, bank account or similar?
P2P transactions is one way. There are crypto ATMs all over too.
I have a lot of experience in the Vietnam market. Most people there don't have credit cards, but they do have bank accounts and can easily buy crypto from a variety of sites... binance, remitano, localbitcoins, bitcoinvn, etc...
Once you get outside the US, a lot of things open up quite a bit. Especially in developing nations.
I'll add, you can also bootstrap a crypto balance by trading labor, even anonymously
Many people started in Bitcoin by mining.
Raises hand! 2014. =) Still mining today (ETH).
Because you can use a central authority (ie, company, any organization really). "Distributed computing" doesn't mean no central authority. With a central authority it's easier to build and has lower transaction costs.
If someone has a bank account, they can get paid, in your scheme. They don't need a credit card.
Sorry, that doesn't answer my question at all.
Then re-state it clearly and I'll do my best. I thought I was answering "why" crypto doesn't help decentralized computing.
The other thing (no cc) isn't related to decentralized computing. It's a payments system problem. You can make a case that crypto is helping, but conflating it with decentralized computing just muddies the waters.
Smart contracts is what makes it possible.
They are neither smart, nor contracts. They are pieces of code written in an esoteric language running in world's most inefficient and expensive VMs where every single operation is billed to the user.
> They are neither smart
Well certainly not the way I write them.
Anyway, this is like arguing a lazy susan is neither lazy, nor involves anyone named Susan. If you know what "smart contracts" as a phrase refers to, I don't understand why you keep bringing this up on HN. We're intelligent enough here to discern that "smart contracts" isn't referring to sentient documents
Ah yes. "We're intelligent enough" in a subthread that starts with "smart contracts make [distributed computing and whatever else] possible".
Oh yea, that's definitely the end of the world and can never be improved upon.
It was possible already. BOINC (and dozens of others) do this.
Smart contracts might be one way to implement it, but it isn't required and doesn't appear to be an improvement on any dimension that people outside crypto care about.
I had not heard of Akash before. So I pay real dollars to setup and run a K8S cluster and people pay me in funny money to host their app on it?
Looking at the calculator[0] the price fluctuates quite a bit. The 30 day average is 1 AKT/$0.35 while the current price is $0.215.
I would like the reverse case where my app runs in other people's machines and I get paid in crypto whenm people use it. Is there such a thing?
Accepting isn't enough. The issue is nobody prices in coin.
Also I would like it run not on just Amazon but on all the PCs out there which take part in the program, without having to contract with multiple parties or be dependent on a single cloud-provider like Amazon.
I think this would be a good use-case for crypto.
The thing about crypto is you don't sign a contract with any single company (like Amazon) to use it. Getting paid by users of your program wherever it executes should be (ideally) as simple.
Correct on both counts. The profit model just isn't sadly there yet. But it also wasn't there for Bitcoin in 2009 or ETH later on and people still bought hardware to mine.
That's because it's not a compelling service. It's been possible since the internet started and never took off.
One of the most compelling services in the history of computing is the opposite - a centrally controlled service offering computing resources in return for standard, government issued currency. Throughout all computing, centrally controlled shared resources has been a compelling value prop.
> That's because it's not a compelling service.
In your opinion.
There are a lot of indications that say otherwise, you just need to look around a bit.
It appears to be the opinion of the market.
Where are the indications? There are dozens of services using something like this, none of them have gone mainstream in the 50 (maybe 25 from a practical perspective?) years it's been possible.
Assuming that really anyone can become a provider in 20 minutes as the website states and there is no KYC whatsoever, this is ridiculously insecure.
Firstly: I’m annoyed that crypto now seems to be synonymous with “blockchain”, rather than cryptography.
Secondly: Most of the blockchain use-case feel a little like the argument for Bittorrent. It’s not that you can’t use it for sensibel purposes, but when you do you’re solving problem most people don’t have.
Bit torrent is _great_. It allows for a massive amount of global information sharing at little to no cost to the creator. I have used bittorent professionally - we were distributing 50+GB to 150 computers in a limited time frame with a limited external internet connection but fast intercommunication. We downloaded the entire package to one computer and used BitTorrent to distribute to the other 150 computers. Niche, yes. Incredibly useful? Yes!
I think bittorrent solves actually does solve a problem most people have. If we lived in a bittorrent using utopia, you would never have to set up a web server because you could just seed static websites from a couple home computers. Popular sites would never go down due to DDoS because their users could support them with their own bandwidth. I think that's the idea behind the newer protocols like IPFS.
I think cryptocurrency could be used to solve a micropayments problem, but I doubt it will ever catch on if it depends on internet companies' forward thinking and benevolence.
Me too, I thought: " We use RSA, AES, ECDSA everyday, why is it a question" at first glance.
Most comments argue to the contrary of what the article lists as potential use-cases. I must say that the problem with crypto is not so much about its foundation (decentralized, blockchain) but rather the very fact that it promotes a broken business model that neither solves old problems nor offers new problems with novel solutions. I think any computation system that gets coupled with monetary incentives is potentially going to self-defeat its purpose one way or another. Crypto just makes it a lot easier for agents to game the system and lead it to corruption. Yes, the traditional financial institutions are not perfect either, but crypto takes their very worst (i.e., market manipulators) and provides them with a platform with far less regulation and much more reach.
> it promotes a broken business model that neither solves old problems nor offers new problems with novel solutions
Have you looked at recent crypto currency research? ZK snarks and starks, multiparty computation, new polynomial commitment schemes and ZKP-friendly hash functions, new BFT consensus mechanisms. These are all novel solutions to age old problems.
The use cases are niche, partly because the technology still has a long way to go before it becomes user friendly. We are only on the cusp of seeing stablecoin regulation - a few years from now, with robust stablecoins, PoS, and scalable L2s, the applications and use cases might look entirely different.
The best use case I know of is Handshake. A domain name system that would be resistant to seizures and censorship. Domains are purchased and a fee is paid which gives a sustainable reason for the coin to have value.
Though I think the same thing could be accomplished on Ethereum with web3.
Of course running your own or shared DNS can have the same value, but I think Blockchain is a legitimate case for decentralizing domain names and having a record that can only be modified by the true owner.
Is there oversight? Does this do an end run around (for instance) trademark law?
I'm not casting judgement when saying this, but if there isn't a governing body then that's attractive to some people but a huge red flag for others.
"that would be resistant to seizures and censorship" - from a cursory look, blocking the protocol and/or identifying peer nodes for a participant is almost trivial, for a state-sponsored actor.I dind't see anywhere in their site a proper threat model, attack simulations or any kind of actual fact that supports the claim of resistance to seizure or censorship. Have you seen those? Also, they clearly forget that most modern CAs actually store SSL certificate details on a blockchain. Its called certificate transparency.
Crypto is more akin to a fundraising strategy then a specific technology. It's like calling a company "tech" and hoping that gets you more dollar signs.
A use case like Helium sounds useful, but using a Blockchain doesn't necessarily add obvious value. The fundamentals don't make sense, you pay for power in dollars but you're paid back in monopoly money. It makes it harder for users to understand the underlying costs... But then again, maybe ambiguity is the value proposition.
> It's like calling a company "tech" and hoping that gets you more dollar signs.
Yeah but... that does actually work... so... hmm.
This is packed full of odd arguments -
> Crypto is successful at being money. If you don't believe me, then I'm happy to sell you the laptop I'm writing this on for 1,000 ETH instead of 1,000 USD.
How about 1000 kilos of gold? Or 1000 1 Carat Diamonds? Does that make diamonds good money?
> Right now, you can take out a loan without involving a bank from one of the many crypto lending protocols.
Yes, but you over-collateralise that loan, swapping tokens around to do so. It doesn't look a lot like lending, it looks more like obfuscation of naive/fraudulent claims of productivity mixed with a game of musical chairs. And right now loan platforms in the crypto space are in all sorts of trouble. Look at "Solend" which appears to have suffered from a large token-holder taking out loans as a way to exit a cryptocurrency that was traded too thinly to cash out directly.
Multiple DeFi lending platforms are mid-collapse, right now.
I really agree with this -
> In other words, crypto's use case is the one that it claims: decentralization.
It's just that that use-case is far less universal, useful or desirable than we have been lead to believe by the cryptocurrency hype factory. For the most part nobody cares, the people putting money into cryptocurrency just want somewhere to gamble, the people not into that aspect are not lining up to use the products of this space, because of that promise. And in many cases (irreversible payments with no oversight!) it's actively bad.
> "after 13 years, there are still no use cases for crypto" is not a rational fact
How about "after 13 years there are still no use cases for crypto that aren't done better without the crypto aspect, or aren't just fucking stupid to begin with?"
Because sure, there are some things you can do with blockchains and smart contracts, but honestly, why the hell would you?
> Crypto is successful at being money. If you don't believe me, then I'm happy to sell you the laptop I'm writing this on for 1,000 ETH instead of 1,000 USD.
> How about 1000 kilos of gold? Or 1000 1 Carat Diamonds? Does that make diamonds good money?
This is a good argument, but I think a better one would be that there is no way the seller is willing to sell any laptop for 1,000 ETH, given that the value of 1000 ETH as of writing is over 1.5m AUD.
If they gave me a quote for the actual value of the laptop in AUD (perhaps 1-2 ETH?) I would still say no, because the inherent volatility in even the most "stable" coins is too high. 2 ETH might be worth 3k AUD today, who knows what it will be when it arrives, let alone when I want to spend it.
> It's wrong though. Or at least, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny because it isn't falsifiable. If you firmly believe this claim, there's no new information you could learn that would cause you to update your belief towards the negative.
Point of order, but "There are no use cases for crypto." is absolutely a falsifiable statement, and in fact this article goes on to falsify it.
Even "There are no powerful use cases for crypto." is falsifiable along the same lines (it's arguable if the article successfully falsifies this statement, however).
The only use case for blockchain is money. Everything else is a scam. We only need one money, the one with the most dominant network effects. Right now, if it every happens, that money looks like it will be Bitcoin. This will take a while. How long it takes depends not so much on Bitcoin itself, but on how bad the competition undermines their use case as money.
In the meantime, people may find it surprising that there is indeed no other use case for the most inefficient database man has ever conceived, other than the on e it was explicitly designed for.
Most altcoins and defi products would have a very different incentive structure if built as a second or third layer on Bitcoin, because the incentive and ability for rugpulls is vastly degraded.
This is written with the idea in mind that a lot of HN users are both informed about and highly skeptical of crypto/web3 (my impression). I actually understand much of the critique, but I think it's not giving credit for a few things that are cool about smart contracts: a) You can enter arbitrary (computable) binding commitments with strangers. This is powerful, it makes all the difference between non-cooperative and cooperative game theory. b) You can separate the creation of web services from their upkeep. You can deploy a smart contract as a weekend project and it'll stay available for the community to use without you having to spend further resources. A plain smart contract without a web front-end is admittedly not user-friendly to access, but there are already several projects trying to provide a front end in a similar fashion (eg blockchains meant for hosting web apps, or uploading apps to IPFS).
Is any of that strictly needed, in a developed country with trustworthy institutions? Well, we could argue. But I think hackers agree that those are at least cool things to tinker with.
(And to those worried about environmental impact: the above doesn't apply to Bitcoin, and once Ethereum has switched to PoS, none of the relevant smart-contract-enabled chains will have that problem anymore)
These "arbitrary commitments with strangers" are only good as long as they do what you intended. Roughly every week there is a major incident with millions of funds lost due to a bug and people who lost money usually are very quick to put up case that the money has to be reverted as the contracts weren't meant to be so arbitrary after all.
Yes, but from a technical perspective immutability leads to some interesting problems again (formal verification, standards, audits,...).
Helium as an incentive for the LoRaWAN network is the killer app for crypto. People are building a world wide LoT network. It's all decentralized. It's all being created by people who earn helium as a reward. I think the same model can be duplicated for other needs. If we give it time we'll see more solutions being created using the same model.
I'm old enough to remember WiFi mesh networks, OLPC and how they would change the world in the future. I've lived in that future for a while now, and seldom see an actual mesh network. One of the advantages of LoRa is that is free. Any monetization scheme on top of this is actually prejudicial to the tech. Also - from my limited knowledge - LoRa is actually quite prone to abuse or traffic prioritization; this is often not an issue on a self-regulated community, but it will clearly be an issue if there is monetary incentive to disrupt the network behaviour.
I think that longevity is something that no other solution can bring. In theory, this network can live forever and improve as tech improves. Look at the Bitcoin network. At this point you have to have a top level miner to be worth mining at all. If we can apply the same to a communications network then we would know that the network is running at the very best levels since there is an incentive for that to happen. In current networks the incentive is to use the same tech as long as possible since it's too expensive for all of it to be replaced by new tech. I don't have the answers but Crypto brings something to the network that other tech can't.
Does Helium have any usage yet? I heard they're charging higher prices than cellular carriers.
Well you need Helium to use the network so at the very least there is that. Maybe you can get Helium by setting up your own node(?), if you need to use the network. It make sense for you as a user to add to the network so you can get some Helium. I don't know the accounting but I think there is a possibility for it to be less expensive. I really don't know a lot but I do know that it's a self improving network so in time the economic parts will work themselves out.
I also believe that the current model of setting up networks can't keep up with a self improving network. Imagine a network that's always a top of the line network. That grows or shrinks as needed. Who will have the resources to compete with it?
Does it have to be a lower price if it works better?
Uber / Lyft is often more expensive than taxis, once the VC funding dried up.
That said, I still generally prefer shared rides cause it is an easy app to pull up on my phone.
I use Uber so I don't get kidnapped -- which is a serious concern where I live.
Unfortunately, all the promising use cases are suppressed and kept from the public. It feels as though people are not allowed to invest in them. On the other hand, obvious scams and Ponzis get a lot of attention and funding. IMO, established interest groups are working hard and investing a lot of money to discredit the space. That's why they only allow shitcoins and scams to gain traction.
This might sound strange or far-fetched, but many people who have been in this industry for a few years share a similar perspective.
If you think the economy is behaving increasingly insane, it's because it is. That's what you get when some entities have access to unlimited fiat. They spend most of it on anti-competitive activities.
> Unfortunately, all the promising use cases are suppressed and kept from the public.
It seems that you know what those use cases are but for some reason you are unwilling to share them here. Did the establishment get to you too or are you just talking out of your ass?
My community launched a cryptocurrency backed by real estate income and we did token buybacks and burn using the income; we did this using our own DEX so our token serves as an alternative to a share (since obviously we cannot list shares of our business on a stock exchange; this had obvious business utility). It works (we managed to acquire 1 property and token price was stable for a long time) but unfortunately we've been struggling to raise significant funding since the beginning and there has been a lot of weird stuff happening with our community members like people pulling out for no reason and then soon after receiving awards from other mainstream (scam) projects whose founders don't like us. In some cases, we've had people spend months working for free building some apps (hoping to get some tokens), finishing it and then pull out mysteriously with weird excuses and refusing any tokens.
You'll find that these buyback-and-burn 'token as a share' projects which are backed by real economic value are suppressed even though they provide businesses with exposure to investors which represents real value for those businesses (and potentially to their investors). None of them ever end up growing to the point that they can become fully decentralized (though most of them look promising initially). Obviously many founders take 'bribes' (in the form of price pumps) to sabotage their own projects.
I've worked for such project before and watched it self-sabotage. It was very obvious but they started to hire a lot of people and adding more bureaucracy to make the business look more legitimate... But they achieved absolutely nothing in 5 years.
Is he actually closing the discussion on crypto as money because eth>usd ? Does this mean we should be using Berkshire shares as money ? Or platinum ? Or are there criteria besides "value" that make something good as "money" ? Shouldn't he be looking into those instead of whining for half his blurb that people are being simplistic, while being incredibly simplistic himself ?
Is price the only criteria for file storage ?N What about performance, resilience, availability...
Are in-game NFT any more tradable than regular in-game items ?
His blurb actually took me a step further towards thinking that crypto is just a bunch of baselss claims. He sure does string them enthusiastically, with zero critical thinking.
For me it's just a waiting game. I'm not going to start the next big crypto project, and I really don't want to get too caught up in FOMO, so if blockchain actually becomes huge and useful, I'll wait and see. I don't mind if it does, or if it doesn't. There are certainly aspects of it that sound very exciting, but also it seems that the unwieldiness of it counteracts that.
In many ways it's like quantum computing vs. classical computing, everyone is very hyped about it, but no one knows exactly what we are going to do with it, and it isn't clear that the cost and difficulty of using it justify the somewhat ephemeral benefits.
Certificate Transparency. Both Chrome and Safari implement it and you will receive an e-mail from Cloudflare if someone creates a certificate for your domain:
It is kind of a blockchain with proof of authority. More precisely it is a Merkle tree with certificate authorities seen as trusted nodes by the web browsers. This idea was extended in something called General Transparency and implemented in the Google Trillian project: https://sites.google.com/site/certificatetransparency/genera...
When people refer to "crypto" they mean cryptocurrency. In a more general non-currency sense they still refer to trustless blockchains that solve the Byzantine Generals Problem.
> Crypto is successful at being money. If you don't believe me, then I'm happy to sell you the laptop I'm writing this on for 1,000 ETH instead of 1,000 USD.
You might be happy to sell it, but I am not happy to buy it using ETH. I think it's a bit silly that the author accuses critics of not understanding crypto, but they clearly don't understand money. I might miss something here, but I am afraid in their logic the Kuwaiti Dinar is somehow better than the Dollar because you need to pay 3 dollar to get a Dinar.
Edit: typo
Here's another one: [0]. I love sending boosts and streaming satoshis (sats) back to indie creators (40 sats/min is the default in Castamatic which I use) who sometimes share them completely transparently with other parties (like opensats [1]) or guests on shows.
"Crypto is successful at being money. If you don't believe me, then I'm happy to sell you the laptop I'm writing this on for 1,000 ETH instead of 1,000 USD." Lol, Great reasoning! ll happily give you 1000ETH for 1000 1K gold bars! I'll throw in a laptop for free! Pretty indicative of the level of thought invested in writing this.
The problem is that crypto is marketed (often) to consumers but crypto is really infrastructure so the target user is the enterprise, not the consumer. Any consumer use case is built on top of the infrastructure, and the consumers don't care if it's crypto or not.
In short, crypto is b2b and not B2C.
"Few technologies have a clear start point. Did the internet start in Tim Berners-Lee in 1990? Or in 1982 with TCP/IP? Or in the 1970's with CYCLADES? Or in 1969 with ARPANET? Or in 1965 with the invention of packet switching? Or in 1950's with time-sharing? Can you distinguish the internet from computers or information theory? Maybe it starts at radio or the telegraph."
Did you say 'over'? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no! It ain't over now, 'cause when the goin' gets tough, the tough get goin'. Who's with me? Let's go! Come on!...
(returning): What the f--k happened to the crypto I used to know? Where's the spirit? Where's the guts, huh? This could be the greatest night of our lives, but you're gonna let it be the worst. 'Ooh, we're afraid to go with you, crypto, we might get in trouble.' (shouting) Well, just kiss my ass from now on! Not me! I'm not gonna take this. Coinbase, he's a dead man! Celsius, dead! Ethereum...
I'm quite confused, the article is supposed to be an advocacy piece, but it is just being all defensive about where the use cases are.
With TCP/IP, or packet switching, they did have an idea that it will be useful, but noone could imagine how popular it's going to be. With crypto, it seems the opposite, I'm afraid.
Noone needs a use case for a Raspberry Pi, or a Raspberry Pi Pico (the latter, many would say, borders on being useless with other, cheaper and/or more complete platforms being available). But I can just buy one, and tinker with it and voila. I don't need a use case to run a Z80 retro emulator on a Pico, I can just do it on my own, without any "industry" deciding which type of emulators should the investors have.
Why "crypto" needs a use case is exactly because people insist it's money, and had to be acquired with money.
While it was all P2P, and you could get whole bitcoins for fun, it were different times. Nowadays, you can't mine any meaningful amount of it unless you invest in thousands, or you buy them with money or credit card. And it's starting to be either illegal in some countries or in a custodial wallet, going poof when the company goes bankrupt.
> Crypto is successful at being money. If you don't believe me, then I'm happy to sell you the laptop I'm writing this on for 1,000 ETH instead of 1,000 USD.
Utterly absurd and yet even still seems to make the exact opposite point. 1000 ETH can be sold for over USD1m, if ETH were successful money surely you would be indifferent to receiving $1000 and $1000 worth of ETH. Not to mention this seems to imply everything is ‘money’, I’d swap my phone for an RTX3090 so I guess it’s money too. In some sense maybe but this is so broad that the word ‘money’ ceases to have much use discussing.
This piece is ridiculous. It accuses people who believe there are no use cases of making a bad faith statement while interpreting it in the most literal way possible. They aren’t saying you can’t do anything at all with crypto. Many crypto projects are interesting from a purely technical perspective, but mass market adoption isn’t driven by admiration of a technical implementation.
It presents several technologies most of which have been developed as a crypto version of an existing technology for which a use case exists. In this circumstance the ‘use-case’ sceptics refer to is a feature that dominates the existing products for a price users are willing to pay. For the novel ones it's still unknown, but scepticism here is obviously warranted.
I’m not even wedded to my scepticism of crypto. I have an interest in distributed systems and seeing ways people try to design byzantine fault tolerant systems. But I’m yet to see a project that I would use at all and I semi-regularly look.
Even the final claim to cut out middlemen is false. To the end user transaction fees paid to miners don't feel any different to a fee charged by a bank on a transfer except maybe in magnitude.
edited: said USD instead of ETH
> Many crypto projects are interesting from a purely technical perspective, but mass market adoption isn’t driven by admiration of a technical implementation.
BitTorrent and Tor are interesting and useful but lack mainstream mass market adoption, but these do not make daily rounds on HN front page with dozens of “this technology is good for nothing” comments.
I disagree with the author - ETH might be money-like but it’s use cases are broader than that, and the assets including stablecoins are more like shares or digital gold than state money. To those who use crypto a lot, all of these are just different assets with different uses and degrees of custody, be it fiat or crypto or stocks or physical gold.
> To the end user transaction fees paid to miners don't feel any different to a fee charged by a bank on a transfer except maybe in magnitude.
Part of this is lack of education. In ETH part of each fee is burned, providing value to all ETH holders by reducing supply. In PoS chains, the fees are redistributed to all staking validators - with delegation it means all users can also be, over long time periods, beneficiaries of these protocol fees.
One of the use-case is to unfriend friends.
Basically, you over-hype a crypto to your friends, then they invest huge sums of their savings, then immediately a crash occurs, wiping 90% of the saving.
Next use-case is to recommend stables.
> Crypto is successful at being money. If you don't believe me, then I'm happy to sell you the laptop I'm writing this on for 1,000 ETH instead of 1,000 USD.
Let us know when the laptop sells.
I know the ship has long sailed but my first reaction was, "What? They're everywhere!" - understanding crypto as cryptography. I guess I'm officially an old man now.
How are cryptocurrency loans supposed to work?
If I need own enough crypto assets as collateral to cover the loan value, whats the point in getting a loan?
Same point as getting a margin loan against your stocks. Leverage.
Also avoiding taxable events, and keeping a desirable position
Digital art and collectibles with easy ownership and provenance guarantees. You can't do that any other way.
No, a centralized database doesn't cut it. Remember how you hate "buying" movies from Google or Amazon only for them to shut down the service down the line? Why would you not hate the same thing for art?
Also, now it's cheap. Just buy some and relax, guys. Let it go.
I've bought a game and a mega subscription using btc.
thats about it. after a year of having some.
Dunno, but I notice if you pronounce it "grifto", people know exactly what you mean without explanation.
Number go up.
As much as I agree with thise meme on longer timeframes, stating it now is a bit unfortunate.
The problem with crypto is that the main unique features are only "distributed trust" or the "public immutable ledger" aspects. Everything else can be implemented or emulated much more easily emulated with simpler, traditional technologies.
The thing is, nobody actually cares if the thing they trust is distributed or not. They just want to not have to trust some specific third parties. They very rarely want their information to be public and immutable.
For example, banks would really like to be able to detect credit card fraud where customers use a cc from bank A to pay off the cc debt in bank B. But they don't want to trust each other, so how do they exchange this data?
Crypto people would instantly jump and say: "Blockchain!"
But what's required here is not distributed ledgers, and certainly not public ledgers. The whole problem is thank bank A doesn't want to give B their customer records. Making it public is worse.
Instead what they do is hire a third-party that's not a bank, like Equifax, Experian, and the like.
These companies hold the ledger centrally, secretly, and don't tell anyone[1] the contents, including bank A or B! Instead, they sell back to the banks the "cc fraud analysis" only, after having done the cross-bank transaction analysis.
There are hundreds, if not thousands of companies like this around the world. I know of several that collect sales information from competing companies and then sell back the anonymized statistics to them. There's basically one for every industry, in every large country.
About 90% of what crypto does can be implemented much more sanely, cheaply, and privately using something like a cloud service.
For example, Azure SQL now has a "Ledger" feature where it keeps cryptographic hashes of transactions in a chain (sound familiar?), and keeps these in immutable blob storage. This blob storage can be restricted to specific private networks. Even if it is public, there is access control based on API keys and the like.
Corporations that need an immutable ledger that "none of them control but all of them can access and verify" can just hire a third-party to spin one of these up and host it in the cloud. Faster, cheaper, simpler, compatible with ordinary SQL applications, and private. That last one can't be underestimated. That's a killer feature that no blockchain can provide without crypto wizardry that only 2 or 3 people on the planet understand.
Ref: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/se...
[1] Have you ever wondered why the Equifax data breach affected the records of so many people from so many banks? This is why! Their core business model is cross-bank data collection and analysis.
The crypto use case is bitcoin.
Everything you can do elsewhere you can do it in Bitcoin, and safer.