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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?

#191

Post by execveat »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #147
ogogmad wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is typical of DeFi people. "Technically correct is the best kind of correct." Your collateral would be other crypto. So it would: - Be worth more than the house. - Be completely virtual, so you can't use it to do anything in the real world. - Be fairly liquid, as if it were already money. - Be as difficult to obtain in the first place as the cash needed to buy a house without a loan. [EDIT: More difficult becaus…

> Be completely virtual Isn't all money completely virtual? Yes, of course there are physical notes, but those just represent the money

In physical world a collateral can be a car or house. In that case you continue using them while paying out the loan. In crypto world "loan" is a pretty pointless construct useful only for attracting clueless investors.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#192

Post by Kbelicius »

cryptica wrote: post #166

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…

> Unfortunately, all the promising use cases are suppressed and kept from the public.

It seems that you know what those use cases are but for some reason you are unwilling to share them here. Did the establishment get to you too or are you just talking out of your ass?

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#193

Post by execveat »

t_mann wrote: post #151

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…

These "arbitrary commitments with strangers" are only good as long as they do what you intended. Roughly every week there is a major incident with millions of funds lost due to a bug and people who lost money usually are very quick to put up case that the money has to be reverted as the contracts weren't meant to be so arbitrary after all.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#194

Post by aforwardslash »

seibelj wrote: post #120
aforwardslash wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite far from defending the chinese government,but your whole thread seems to be an incentive for tax evasion "because the government commits horrible atrocities". Governments are not "moral" or "immoral" - they are amoral. Their purpose (when they are good) isn't to improve conditions for everyone, just their citizens. And if that comes at a cost to other citizens in other countries, they are still within their…

The reason someone in Vietnam, China, or any other country with terrible government would dare dream of being paid to do graphic design without the government tracking such a payment is not simply about tax evasion. You might be helping to promote abortion. Or gay rights. Or liberal democracy. There are innumerable reasons why someone in an authoritarian regime would prefer to earn a living outside the political appa…

"You might be helping to promote abortion. Or gay rights. Or liberal democracy." - right, because eg. abortion is illegal only on "authoritarian regimes". So basically, we're back to the initial argument - cryptocurrencies are good to sponsor criminal/illegal activities - being promoting democracy values on authoritarian regimes or moving money around in human slave trafficking...

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#195

Post by aforwardslash »

eldenwrong wrote: post #121
aforwardslash wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite far from defending the chinese government,but your whole thread seems to be an incentive for tax evasion "because the government commits horrible atrocities". Governments are not "moral" or "immoral" - they are amoral. Their purpose (when they are good) isn't to improve conditions for everyone, just their citizens. And if that comes at a cost to other citizens in other countries, they are still within their…

Quoted post unavailable.

There is nothing worse than someone who lacks critical thinking. If you support promoting widespread criminal activities because brutal regimes like China exists, there is no distinction between you and a totalitarian regime - you both think YOUR vision is the right one, without space for tolerance or plurality of opinions. Imagine that.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#197

Post by t_mann »

execveat wrote: post #193
t_mann wrote: post #151

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…

These "arbitrary commitments with strangers" are only good as long as they do what you intended. Roughly every week there is a major incident with millions of funds lost due to a bug and people who lost money usually are very quick to put up case that the money has to be reverted as the contracts weren't meant to be so arbitrary after all.

Yes, but from a technical perspective immutability leads to some interesting problems again (formal verification, standards, audits,...).

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#198

Post by cryptica »

Kbelicius wrote: post #192
cryptica wrote: post #166

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…

> Unfortunately, all the promising use cases are suppressed and kept from the public. It seems that you know what those use cases are but for some reason you are unwilling to share them here. Did the establishment get to you too or are you just talking out of your ass?

My community launched a cryptocurrency backed by real estate income and we did token buybacks and burn using the income; we did this using our own DEX so our token serves as an alternative to a share (since obviously we cannot list shares of our business on a stock exchange; this had obvious business utility). It works (we managed to acquire 1 property and token price was stable for a long time) but unfortunately we've been struggling to raise significant funding since the beginning and there has been a lot of weird stuff happening with our community members like people pulling out for no reason and then soon after receiving awards from other mainstream (scam) projects whose founders don't like us. In some cases, we've had people spend months working for free building some apps (hoping to get some tokens), finishing it and then pull out mysteriously with weird excuses and refusing any tokens.

You'll find that these buyback-and-burn 'token as a share' projects which are backed by real economic value are suppressed even though they provide businesses with exposure to investors which represents real value for those businesses (and potentially to their investors). None of them ever end up growing to the point that they can become fully decentralized (though most of them look promising initially). Obviously many founders take 'bribes' (in the form of price pumps) to sabotage their own projects.

I've worked for such project before and watched it self-sabotage. It was very obvious but they started to hire a lot of people and adding more bureaucracy to make the business look more legitimate... But they achieved absolutely nothing in 5 years.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#199

Post by execveat »

RexM wrote: post #21
latchkey wrote: post #5

Excellent article for once. Another one is decentralized compute. AWS pioneered taking unused compute and commoditizing it. Well, there is a lot of unused compute in the world and building ways to take advantage of it is part of what I see 'web3' as being about. PoW mining, however "wasteful", is still a great example of allowing anyone to effectively participate in the validation of transactions and getting rewarded…

I had not heard of Akash before. So I pay real dollars to setup and run a K8S cluster and people pay me in funny money to host their app on it? Looking at the calculator[0] the price fluctuates quite a bit. The 30 day average is 1 AKT/$0.35 while the current price is $0.215. [0]: https://akash.praetorapp.com/calculator

Assuming that really anyone can become a provider in 20 minutes as the website states and there is no KYC whatsoever, this is ridiculously insecure.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#200

Post by hiq »

koonsolo wrote: post #190
hiq wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 0 fee transactions You'd have to check how sustainable this is, Uber was (is?) also very cheap in some areas, just because it's massively subsidized. A solution that works today but not tomorrow and burns cash in between is not necessarily something you want.

I get it that you are sceptical. But you probably haven't looked at how Nano works. It's 100% distributed and is battle tested in practice. The biggest challenge they had was protecting against spam. But a few releases back they solved this issue. Technically a very strong project.

> you probably haven't looked at how Nano works

I have looked at the past n similar products and it was always the same story. At some point, you don't need to look at the implementation details anymore, you can take this from first principles: somebody somewhere is running a ledger. You have to pay this someone one way or another, unless they're just volunteering.

> a few releases back they solved this issue

How are they getting paid?

Regarding the ledger operators, from https://nano.org/faq#nodes:

> Instead, participants on the nano network are driven by external incentives, such as helping maintain an instant payment network they can use without fees.

So it does look like volunteering / donating computing resources, and the 0 transaction fee doesn't reflect the actual costs.

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