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Do Cryptocurrencies Provide ANY() Real-Economic Value at All?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Do Cryptocurrencies Provide ANY() Real-Economic Value at All?

#31

Post by hooande »

FloresHernandez wrote: post #15

Yes, it shields you against your own government by giving an alternative they can't stop or ban. In some parts of the world, government is hostile towards their own population, either by incompetence or malice. Debasement of the national fiat currency is theft perpetrated by the government and crypto provides an alternative for that. Can you just use US Dollars? Sure you can. But your government can search you for th…

Until people can buy food and essentials with crypto, it has little value on its own. The US government can ban any bank or credit processor from exchanging crypto with any individual right now.

The coins aren't any good unless you can spend them. And for the foreseeable future, governments have complete control over that

Re: Do Cryptocurrencies Provide ANY() Real-Economic Value at All?

#33

Post by shepardrtc »

Cryptocurrency provides economic incentive to support a blockchain, and a blockchain provides support to a decentralized, distributed service.

For example:

1) Money transfer - with no central point of failure or central point of control, a blockchain database provides trustless support to verify and maintain a history of transactions. But to do the work, economic incentives to workers must be applied.

Example: Bitcoin

2) Storage - once again, no central point of failure or control, with a blockchain providing the history and data regarding what is stored, and with cryptocurrency providing economic incentive for someone to provide storage to the network.

Example: Siacoin

3) Contracts - trustless contracts or escrow, maintained in a blockchain database with code for execution maintained on the blockchain as well. Verification and execution of code is done by workers who are incentivized by cryptocurrency.

Example: Ethereum

Why use cryptocurrency instead of USD? Because USD isn't electronic and is heavily regulated. As much as we like to think our money system is electronic, its really only hacky applications on top of our existing banking system. I used to work at a very large bank in the payments processing division, and you have no idea how many times they screwed up payments across the entire world. Sunday morning deployments often involved double-charges, missed charges, and overall screwing up virtually every merchant in North America. The only reason our monetary system hasn't collapsed is because people work very, very hard to fix all of these hidden failures. Cryptocurrencies remove the human element and provide a more efficient, error-free system.

Re: Do Cryptocurrencies Provide ANY() Real-Economic Value at All?

#34

Post by _w1kke_ »

Globale employment of digital workers is a breeze to do with a fast blockchain based solution. The workers can be onboarded using their wallet, their contributions can be logged on the blockchain, and their rewards can be directly paid out to their wallets. Their work can be analysed without the need to know which gender they have or where they come from. This opens the door for unbiased reputation and reward schemes. A true equaliser.

This is an application of blockchain technology that becomes much more expensive without it. The hassle of hiring people around the world, paying them, and rating their work objectively is expensive and very difficult.

Re: Do Cryptocurrencies Provide ANY() Real-Economic Value at All?

#35

Post by maxerickson »

quantum_mcts wrote: post #13

All your arguments has this implicit assumption of a central authority that you trust to do its job: - "SEPA is pan-European credit transfers". Emphasis in "European". Good luck _reliably_ sending money to China or across Atlantic _in_several_days_. Reliable 10s is a dream there. - "Every country already has its native currency." Emphasis on "country". With a central bank that manages the supply. - "All (democratic)…

Contracts can't enforce themselves.

Re: Do Cryptocurrencies Provide ANY() Real-Economic Value at All?

#37

Post by quantum_mcts »

maxerickson wrote: post #35
quantum_mcts wrote: post #13

All your arguments has this implicit assumption of a central authority that you trust to do its job: - "SEPA is pan-European credit transfers". Emphasis in "European". Good luck _reliably_ sending money to China or across Atlantic _in_several_days_. Reliable 10s is a dream there. - "Every country already has its native currency." Emphasis on "country". With a central bank that manages the supply. - "All (democratic)…

Contracts can't enforce themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_contract

Re: Do Cryptocurrencies Provide ANY() Real-Economic Value at All?

#39

Post by realce »

quantum_mcts wrote: post #37
maxerickson wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contracts can't enforce themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_contract

Where in this article does it describe how I get tenants out of my rental when they don't pay into the smart contract?

That's what enforcement is, not just some rules in a spreadsheet.

Re: Do Cryptocurrencies Provide ANY() Real-Economic Value at All?

#40

Post by throw100010 »

bgitarts wrote: post #26

[flagged]

> The ultimate disintermediation is governance. With strong cryptography and smart contracts new forms of governance are possible such as liquid democracy.

How can the network know that two people with ordinary CPUs are two distinct people, while that person over there with an AntMiner isn't 1000 people, even though their relative PoW output suggests they are?

Tying the mathematical world to the real world has always been a problem with these schemes.

If it can't tell a group of people from one person with a mining rig, then the liquid democracy becomes one dollar one vote rather than one person one vote, and we all know how democratic that is.

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