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Where are all the crypto use cases?

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Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#151

Post by t_mann »

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)

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#152

Post by [deleted] »

MrPatan wrote: post #110

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.

[deleted]

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#153

Post by whatisweb3 »

strangeattractr wrote: post #19

> 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 i…

> 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.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#154

Post by ohgodplsno »

redox99 wrote: post #127
petesergeant wrote: post #94

> 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 presu…

> 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.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#155

Post by hansword »

> 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

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#156

Post by Dylan16807 »

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…

> 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.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#157

Post by somebodythere »

shafyy wrote: post #124
rnk wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please explain what this is a bad use case. I'd love to learn why that is.

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.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#158

Post by bsaul »

shp0ngle wrote: post #144
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…

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 bi…

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.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#159

Post by pcthrowaway »

uncomputation wrote: post #14

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. T…

> > 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

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#160

Post by hnaccount_rng »

seibelj wrote: post #67
hiq wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 curr…

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…

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.

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