Things cryptocurrency enthusiasts probably won't tell you

What functional technical innovation is there in ETH that is currently available for use? Some real, usable product that people actively utilize today that's unique and has tangible value?

Great article (less the typos, but I feel that's understandable for something so lengthy in which the author did clearly put forth lots of effort to do his research).

I'm in the camp of people interested in cryptocurrencies due to their libertarian qualities and largely motivated by what I perceive to be repeated irresponsible behavior by governments in how they administer their currency (most recently notable in the years surrounding 2008 - just before Bitcoin was activated). In fact, I find it curious that the article did note even allude to the setting in which Bitcoin was born, as its roots go very much against regulation by governments.

The whole idea behind blockchains is distributed consensus. One of the greatest values behind bitcoin is its lack of centralization and a sort of distributed governance surrounding it (more so with some other cryptocurrencies, but bitcoin does have primitive mechanisms for users to vote towards such things as protocol evolution). It has some other advantages that government-operated currencies could make use of, such as being difficult to forge, but the real innovations are centered around the user not needing to trust third parties (govt included) to behave in the user's interest. If you embrace regulations to the extent that they exist in traditional currencies - if transactions/addresses are ever forced to be blacklisted (and thereby reversible), or funds made to be seizable by design, for example - then what value do cryptocurrencies provide that couldn't be replicated by a non-cryptographic/centrally operated digital currency, and why then _wouldn't_ they be superseded by something easier to use/control?

It seems to me that the lack of regulation is a large part of the value behind bitcoin. So when the article quotes:

> The cryptocurrency world is basically rediscovering a vast framework of securities and consumer protection laws that already exist; and now they know why they exist.

I'm skeptical. If consumers want regulation, they'd use the established currencies. Bitcoin exists to be unregulated.

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On a less political note, this article was full of useful information and thoughts, so thanks to the author. I popped out of the cryptocurrency world in 2013 and fell back into it two months ago, and it's disappointingly difficult to find articles like this that actually have some depth to them. There's too much get-rich-quick hype and not enough interest in understanding the social or technical developments associated with cryptocurrencies most places I visit.

As someone who has followed the crypto-currency scene for the past several years I don't disagree with a lot of the broad points presented about fraud being a problem but he is presenting some flat out false information to support his thesis.

To take one example, his claim that historically Coinbase has kept traction stats close to the vest is completely false. He says that the only accurate user numbers come from a filing in the IRS lawsuit. The IRS lawsuit was initially filed in November 2016 and has been ongoing. Coinbase has published user stats on their about page[0] since November of 2014 two full years before the IRS took Coinbase to court, you can go look in the wayback archive. So the claim that the lawsuit provides the only glimpse at the number of Coinbase users is categorically false.

[0] https://www.coinbase.com/about

I think the word you are looking for is differentiation.

They just successfully completed an atomic swap with bitcoin so yes LTC is defitely innovating too.