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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?

#161

Post by pcthrowaway »

albertopv wrote: post #74
latchkey wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's your personal opinion, but you're not helping the discourse by answering 'why' it isn't required or even help. Let's step outside of the box for a moment. If I'm in some other country and I don't have easy access to a credit card and I want to build out the next cool idea, how do I get access to scalable compute?

If you are a starter, how do you buy crypto without credit card, bank account or similar?

I'll add, you can also bootstrap a crypto balance by trading labor, even anonymously

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#162

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#164

Post by soco »

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.

Which early internet crash event are you referring to?

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#165

Post by JumpCrisscross »

koonsolo wrote: post #92
woopwoop wrote: post #43

> 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. Ford F-150s are 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 Ford F-150s instead of 1,000 USD.

If you want to read my article, you can pay me 0.001 Nano (sub-second, 0 fee transaction), or you can pay me $0.001. Oh no wait, you can't pay me $0.001!

> Oh no wait, you can't pay me $0.001!

Plenty of settlement systems permit arbitrary precisions of dollars. It’s just useless for day to day purposes for most people, so a consumer version never took off.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#166

Post by cryptica »

Unfortunately, all the promising use cases are suppressed and kept from the public. It feels as though people are not allowed to invest in them. On the other hand, obvious scams and Ponzis get a lot of attention and funding. IMO, established interest groups are working hard and investing a lot of money to discredit the space. That's why they only allow shitcoins and scams to gain traction.

This might sound strange or far-fetched, but many people who have been in this industry for a few years share a similar perspective.

If you think the economy is behaving increasingly insane, it's because it is. That's what you get when some entities have access to unlimited fiat. They spend most of it on anti-competitive activities.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#167

Post by whatisweb3 »

behnamoh wrote: post #16

Most comments argue to the contrary of what the article lists as potential use-cases. I must say that the problem with crypto is not so much about its foundation (decentralized, blockchain) but rather the very fact that it promotes a broken business model that neither solves old problems nor offers new problems with novel solutions. I think any computation system that gets coupled with monetary incentives is potentia…

> it promotes a broken business model that neither solves old problems nor offers new problems with novel solutions

Have you looked at recent crypto currency research? ZK snarks and starks, multiparty computation, new polynomial commitment schemes and ZKP-friendly hash functions, new BFT consensus mechanisms. These are all novel solutions to age old problems.

The use cases are niche, partly because the technology still has a long way to go before it becomes user friendly. We are only on the cusp of seeing stablecoin regulation - a few years from now, with robust stablecoins, PoS, and scalable L2s, the applications and use cases might look entirely different.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#168

Post by Grimburger »

dmitriid wrote: post #85
seibelj wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This avoids all of the capital controls and knowledge the state has So. Illegal movement of money.

> Illegal movement of money

Which covers use-cases like sending money for medicine to your sick grandmother in Iran.

Not all laws are just and a world were no laws could be broken would be a nightmare.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#169

Post by pcthrowaway »

dmitriid wrote: post #89
Anon1096 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smart contracts is what makes it possible.

They are neither smart, nor contracts. They are pieces of code written in an esoteric language running in world's most inefficient and expensive VMs where every single operation is billed to the user.

> They are neither smart

Well certainly not the way I write them.

Anyway, this is like arguing a lazy susan is neither lazy, nor involves anyone named Susan. If you know what "smart contracts" as a phrase refers to, I don't understand why you keep bringing this up on HN. We're intelligent enough here to discern that "smart contracts" isn't referring to sentient documents

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#170

Post by reacweb »

bsaul wrote: post #158
shp0ngle wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I do not think people should confuse minitel rose (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel_rose) with prostitution. In one case, the victim is the prostitute, in the other case, it is the client.
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