161–170 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.
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.
The same thing confuses me. This is meant to be a feed for tech savvy people. It seems as though, the majority of HN users haven't invested any time into understanding it. So they just label it bad.
I wasted a year of my life working for a crypto company, I've actually committed code to Ethereum through the Geth project. I learned it's all a casino of completely useless money moving schemes.
What makes even ENS cool tech? The sole purpose of those .eth domains is to receive crypto, ohh and make the founders extremely wealthy. Why did they need to launch an ENS coin, other than to dump on the public when it was 5x the current price.
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Three of these are just money laundering and then the 4th is "and maybe some cool ideas." I really don't see how the money laundering is a long term niche. They'll get regulated eventually. I do think the whole event has dredged up some interesting ideas and desires that were being ignored, but of lot of those "cool promise here" ideas could probably work without a blockchain.
Let's take a modern example of the canadian truckers. How would you get money to them when Canada was able to get US companies to block their funding with fiat? Use a different company and hope another few million doesn't get locked up? That seems like the only alternative and I'm not sure many people would think that's a viable alternative.
Truly 24x7x365 instant banking is a pretty great use case. TradFi isn't close.
[1] https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-insta...
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…
I don't think "censorship resistance" is the correct term. I think what you're really describing is "law enforcement resistance" (e.g. your activities are illegal).
And even in those cases, unless cryptocurrency is circulating as actual currency in the economy (which it isn't), most of the law-enforcement resistance is fatally compromised by the need for onramps and offramps.
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The biggest use case for Bitcoin is of it being an escape from arbitrary printing of money by central banks. The richer your home country, the further you are from intuitively grasping how catastrophic printing is in the long run.
Why is it catastrophic then? Isn’t it exactly this property that allows us to have a more or less stable currency?
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.
Except, it's not that? Or at the very least it's a poor version of that. Want to get and move Bitcoin easily? You are going through an exchange, which will absolutely be regulated at some point. Not going through an exchange? Well, I suppose you can try and find a local person who already has some Bitcoin to sell you and work out some sort of shady transfer and hope neither of you get scammed. Now you have some "curr…
1) The fact that Bitcoin mining traffic is detectable by ISPs (similar to torrents), so if a country prohibits it, the ISPs could simply detect that traffic trivially and get you arrested. Or simply block downloads of the client, etc
2) The centralization (or lack of democratization) of mining. A few huge pools, mining rig operations instead of individuals running software on their computers. SHA-256 ASICs and lack of blockchain pruning caused this.
3) The overreliance on exchanges - not your keys, not your coins etc
4) Every transaction is trackable, no real anonymity
5) The -even daily- value fluctuations
6) Hard to understand for layman people
That said even with all of these drawbacks people do use it in real life for its original intended purpose (remove the middleman), specifically in third world countries. But I think it would be great to go back to 2009 with all of the current knowledge and redesign these bits
I think that inevitably, it will be banned at some point in the future due to 1) and 2).
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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…
I'm originally from Bosnia / Ex-Yugoslavia. 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…
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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.
Hey - I get it, I used crypto precisely because I wanted to avoid government regulation when buying black market goods back when the silk road was still a thing. But I think you're absolutely bonkers if you think that any crypto today is actually a real solution to your lack of trust. Here's my take: You think that by using crypto, you're avoiding trust in governmental and financial institutions - and in some (incred…
Now all you need is connected oracle that can judge completion percentage of a bathroom and communicate with the blockchain! /s
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…
In other words, it just so happens that the exact situations where crypto is useful, are the same situations where it is very hard for capitalists to earn a good return on their capital. Unstable places or illegal markets.
It's not that the existence of crypto doesn't make sense. It's that investing in it makes no sense, because it will only be successful in scenarios where "investing in things" at all is a lost cause.
