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Where are all the crypto use cases?

evanjconrad.com

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Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#201

Post by piaste »

latchkey wrote: post #101
ahtihn wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#202

Post by danaris »

aeternum wrote: post #63
jrumbut wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#203

Post by theamk »

whatisweb3 wrote: post #135
tptacek wrote: post #8

If 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 pe…

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 decent…

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.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#204

Post by scott_w »

whatisweb3 wrote: post #142
scott_w wrote: post #52

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,…

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…

> 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).

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#205

Post by tigertigertiger »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #154
redox99 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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]…

> 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?

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#206

Post by whatisweb3 »

scott_w wrote: post #204
whatisweb3 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#207

Post by whatisweb3 »

theamk wrote: post #203
whatisweb3 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 decent…

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.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#208

Post by koonsolo »

hiq wrote: post #200
koonsolo wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#209

Post by aeternum »

jrumbut wrote: post #79
aeternum wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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...

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#210

Post by Aunche »

krageon wrote: post #186
Aunche wrote: post #75

> 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 thou…

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.
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