151–160 of 272 posts
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.
Well said. I don't understand why there's always so much hand-wringing and pearl-clutching over crypto.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
In my experience (UK traditional banking system) I can move money directly A to C at 4am on a weekend, any amount, without talking to anyone for a NO fee. That's just how online banking works, and I'd have to increase the sums of money involved by an order of magnitude or two before having to walk into a bank. What sorts of values of A, C and $ do you have in mind where a bank isn't cheaper, faster and more convenien…
Instead of having to move money from wallet to bank to stock exchange, money can move directly from wallet to exchange and vice versa, no bank.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the only right answer. Pack it up. For real, every time I try to answer my I do crypto, often people just don't understand. They just don't. They just don't understand why I don't trust entities. If you don't understand this, then you don't understand crypto. Period. There is no other debate necessary. Period. Full stop. We go on our own way. Full stop.
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…
Crypto companies with legal exposure? Yes can be censored.
Open source crypto protocols? As long as raspberry pi’s and digital comms exist, it’s akin to saying the govt can shut down Linux. This is the censorship resistance that matters. It’s not perfect (some ungodly amount of nodes are in AWS and the Trail of Bits report did a good write up as well).
The central authority here is open source software. The author spent a lot of words demonstrating they didn’t know this at all.
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…
My theory is that the likelihood someone understands the use cases is inversely correlated to their trust in government. For example: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789 These articles all follow a common pattern. 1. The trigger – Inflation/distrust in government/bank withdrawal restrictions/paypal freezes your funds/country is at war/etc 2. The response – People gravitate towards a system that is resilient to…
Experienced hyperinflation, experienced civil war, experienced buying bread with 200,000 dinars one year and 2,000,000 next year etc. Experienced scary people with guns knocking at your door. My family and their ancestors all lost all their money and possessions numerous times over the last 100 years, including in the mid-90's.
And yet, I feel it's the people IN position of Western privilege, who have NOT experienced actual 'dystopian future', and what a hostile government actually CAN do, and what living under duress is ACTUALLY like, who think Crypto will somehow solve such problems based on their theoretical envisioning of only a specific part of dystopian future. I still believe Crypto, like anything else, survives at the mercy of your local government. It has a tremendous set of requirements, complexity, and telltale signs, to be helpful against hostile government which can and will knock at your door with a gun, or criminalize all crypto use/mining/exchange, etc.
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…
Endless search? FileCoin is used to pay for IPFS. BTT is used to pay for faster downloads speeds. There are lots of others. My own company has spent 3 years building way more applications that you can see here https://intercoin.org/applications They're open source, and fully documented, try to use them! We're currently building interfaces to power them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySi-wOB28y0 We also have an Inte…
And that is a perfect metaphor for 99% of crypto "usecases"
Ens domains, PoolTogether, Aave and more: https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/ Have these people writing these kind of articles ever downloaded a browser wallet and played around with Defi? The amount of ignorance here is staggering. How is it on HN? HN is supposed to be a place for people who are tech savvy and are able to think about the future and imagine it different from yesterday.
You don't even need to go that broad. I'm working in the cloud infrastructure field (think Kubernetes and such). Just following all developments in that narrow space is such a mind-boggingly huge task that it's physically impossible for a single person to follow all of it (except at extreme surface level). And that's before we consider other areas of tech. Or other areas of interest (politics, science, culture).
To make the task of navigating the world even somewhat tractable, we all have to rely on outside authorities whom we trust for a lot of our information diet. Hence why I am very grateful for known figures like Moxie Marlinspike to examine this topic and provide me with a succinct summary of their impression through writing. That's not to say that I take everything Moxie says as gospel, but I know enough about him to judge which of his statements can be trusted and which need to be taken with a grain of salt.
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…
My theory is that the likelihood someone understands the use cases is inversely correlated to their trust in government. For example: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789 These articles all follow a common pattern. 1. The trigger – Inflation/distrust in government/bank withdrawal restrictions/paypal freezes your funds/country is at war/etc 2. The response – People gravitate towards a system that is resilient to…
In developed nations, populations who are unbanked/underbanked typically have much bigger fish to fry. In developing nations, they typically already have a solution to the banking problem... and also bigger fish to fry.
You'll notice that every article hyping up cryptocurrency as a solution for these things refers to "early adopters". The adopters are no longer early; they're now a perpetually fringe sub-population. (They're also presently experiencing inflation in crypto for the first time.)
Note: I don't save in BTC, just use it to get paid from overseas then convert it to local currency.
Disclaimer: I was an early investor, and still "hodl" crypto, so I'm not without my bias. Dating a viable use case versus other tech depends on when you set the creation date. The internet wasn't commercially viable for its first 25 years. Also we are getting closer and closer to a viable use case for the most basic use case for crypto, payments. Solana Pay and a few others have working products, the problem is netwo…