141–150 of 272 posts
To me, the fact that Bitcoin is a money out of the hands of governments, or anyone really, is the use case. It's also cool that you can use your brain to effectively store your money. Of course, if you believe that governments are good stewards of money, you will probably not find a use case.
Ethernet was invented in 1973. Wifi didn’t come along until 1997. Crypto is wonky bc it’s a virtual infra layer that’s nonetheless a p2p application at the end of the day. However, the tech is clearly focused on building infra out. This view comes direct from core dev teams and general depth of knowledge about the space. Bridges, new chains, new wallets, new crypto approaches like MPC, scaling L1/L2 - this is all infra. There are niche early use cases like DeFi and NFTs, but that’s not the end state.
A common rebuttal from early internet people is “early internet was cool and useful from the beginning!” This is true, but it’s also true Gen pop had no idea what the hell computer people at MIT were doing with mainframes and why it mattered until wifi, dot com, all this showed up. Early adopters were keyed in more and more such as the govt, DoD, infra companies like Cisco. Scientists got involved early.
This mirrors what crypto is going through right now. Infra is getting built out. The tech and apps are cool and useful to a relatively small crowd of computer nerds. Scientists from MIT, UC berk do research for it. Govt and high net worth people are getting interested. Some early apps that get niche users interested are working. The sense of impatience is silly.
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What is the use case of that use case?
Say you want to move $ from service A to C, before Bitcoin it was not possible without a bank intermediary (B). There is processing time, high fees, business hours, etc.. So you’re handholding the process A to B then B to C. With crypto I can move money directly A to C at 4am on a weekend, any amount, without talking to anyone for a tiny fee. Or if I want to move it into my wallet and hold it personally I can do that…
The author somehow misses the number one use case of crypto: as a currency. You can buy things with Bitcoin right now. Therefore each bitcoin has a value. You can move bitcoins around to move value around. Simple as that. The only problem is that, yes, it is indeed early. I don't know why the author brings up the App Store, as if both Bitcoin and the iPhone App Store are even remotely comparable just because they cam…
There is only one use case and that is the originally intended use, as a currency completely decoupled from any one country’s monetary meddling and thus liberating the populace from poor central planners and/or authoritarians. That’s it. That’s all there is to it.
Definitely. Somehow the author went and brought valid arguments against ETH and web3 but failed completely at point #2. Just to answer the author concerns about point #2. There are coins with entire Blockchain that can fit in my OnePlus 7. I am from Algeria (a country without a financial system), LTC and XMR are the coins that brought me out of poverty, not because of gambling but they allowed me to do software devel…
I'm from Nigeria. The Central Bank makes all sorts of policies around inflows and outflows.
E.g. DigitalOcean just has warned me that they will block my account. I checked and realised that the MasterCard issued by my bank has stopped honouring any payment denominated in dollars.
You could pay for this few months ago. But now nothing. I don't even know how to go about it. My friend had run around just to pay for Figma. Sometimes you have to even call friends in diaspora to make payments for you on International sites and just pay them back via crypto.
Inflow here is such a hustle.
I've used wise.com a lot and do like their services but they no longer support Nigeria.
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The problem is that crypto doesn't really solve those problems either . As the article says far more eloquently. I understand that you are saying you were burned by a central authority. But the truth is that the only way to get everything to work is with a central authority. The article gives examples of crypto being fully reliant on central authorities, for instance. Everything being done by crypto today could be do…
The question to me really is which central authorities you trust less... And for me it is at the moment the crypto side. I don't trust exchanges and I can't be bothered to do local transactions. So central government "approved" system is easier for my life.
In fact, given that ownership is fundamentally a mutually agreed upon social norm, and not any sort of real truth - Even if you trust the central authority of your locality less, they are likely a much better resource regardless.
I really think crypto advocates just don't actually understand how power works. Power is not the number in the ledger, it's the number of people who will step up to enforce it for you.
It turns out that number is very, very tiny for crypto. Much, much larger for your local currency - even if it's not as large as you'd like it to be, or "fair" as you think it should be.
Currently we've hired more than 0 people through a global outsourcing company. The outsourcing company sends us invoices, we wire them dollars, they charge us 3% on top of extremely bad forex rates plus 10% for their services, then a local company who's hired "our staff" processes payroll, pays local taxes and insurance, etc. The whole process of getting the money to the recipient takes days to a month. Currently we…
I mean it has good use cases they're not just the ones that scheme promoters want to be true. I know TFA pokes some holes in the censorship resistance attribute of bitcoin but i think everyone can agree it does provide value transfer solution that is much harder to block than Visa/Stripe/etc. 1). Silk Road or dark net markets in general. Can't be done with Visa or other existing solutions at any kind of scale 2). Fun…
Agreed, there are use cases, even obvious use cases. Blockchain provides guarantees that other databases do not. They're just guarantees that assume that some portion of people connecting to it are bad actors. Most people don't really care about solving that problem because they just don't give those people access, but that implies a single authority for access ie: centralization. So blockchain only makes sense when:…
Might change your opinion of it.
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This requires price stability, which is at odds with the use of crypto as a speculative investment vehicle. People use fiat to transact because it is stable. It’s stable because a central bank is using tools available to bring about stability.
There are decentralized stable coins such as Dai that survived massive crashes/volatility in the past and still remained on peg. Crypto ≠ Bitcoin.