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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?

#21

Post by RexM »

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

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#22

Post by wmf »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #10

Helium as an incentive for the LoRaWAN network is the killer app for crypto. People are building a world wide LoT network. It's all decentralized. It's all being created by people who earn helium as a reward. I think the same model can be duplicated for other needs. If we give it time we'll see more solutions being created using the same model.

Does Helium have any usage yet? I heard they're charging higher prices than cellular carriers.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#23

Post by flaque »

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…

> “can you come up with something that will see mainstream use that eclipses the toxic speculation that's perceived to characterize every crypto application“

This is a far better question to put to crypto.

The article isn’t attempting to address that question though.

My bet is “yes”, at maybe 80% confidence. I would say it’s fairly difficult to see though, because speculative projects grow very quickly and dwarf “normal” projects, setting unrealistic comparisons.

Both crypto skeptics and crypto promoters tend to be blinded by candlestick graphs.

The total number of active wallets is still fairly small (a few million), and so a “non-speculative” project doesn’t “seem” like a major project when folks attempt to compare its market cap against speculative projects.

For example, Dark Forest is fairly popular, but isn’t explicitly a speculative project. And so few folks outside of crypto have heard of it.

Crypto suffers from the problem that the speculative parts are mainstream (or at least, are very well known about), but non-speculative use cases are not.

I think this problem is mostly solved by the bubble popping. Crypto-skeptics can pat themselves on the back for predicting the obvious, but may end up being wrong long term because they missed the relatively “small” non-speculative projects.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#25

Post by mike741 »

chowells wrote: post #11

This is the strawman-iest strawman I've seen in a long time. By this logic, there's a use case for getting stabbed in a back alley. Some people need surgery, after all. The proper question is what does cryptocurrency do better than alternatives? On the whole... I think bypassing financial controls to enable ransomware is not an improvement on the previous system.

> The proper question is what does cryptocurrency do better than alternatives?

Bitcoin, as one example, does a better job limiting supply and preventing inflation than its fiat alternatives.

Of course, this doesn't make the article any less of a strawman.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#26

Post by hattmall »

The best use case I know of is Handshake. A domain name system that would be resistant to seizures and censorship. Domains are purchased and a fee is paid which gives a sustainable reason for the coin to have value.

Though I think the same thing could be accomplished on Ethereum with web3.

Of course running your own or shared DNS can have the same value, but I think Blockchain is a legitimate case for decentralizing domain names and having a record that can only be modified by the true owner.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#27

Post by ogogmad »

AlexandrB wrote: post #2

This article seems like it's reaching. I don't think "money" accurately describes what cryptocurrency is because most people who use USD don't trade on the FOREX markets, but most cryptocurrency users are primarily focused on the exchange rate of BTC to USD, not it's functionality as a currency. It's better described as a security, and while it can be used as a medium of exchange its volatility can make that expensiv…

> Right now, you can take out a loan without involving a bank from one of the many crypto lending protocols. You put up some collateral and can take out a loan for extremely cheap, because there isn't a bank in the middle to take a cut.

"Loan" is a very misleading description of what this is. This is margin trading. A loan is when you post a non-liquid asset in the real world -- like a house -- as collateral. Margin trading is when you post a fairly liquid asset (like other cryptocurrencies) as collateral so that you can buy more cryptocurrencies. You can't use these "DeFi loans" to buy a house in the real world.

One reason I think DeFi is bullshit is because its critics describe what it does better than its advocates, who spout incoherent word salad.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#28

Post by max_ »

chowells wrote: post #11

This is the strawman-iest strawman I've seen in a long time. By this logic, there's a use case for getting stabbed in a back alley. Some people need surgery, after all. The proper question is what does cryptocurrency do better than alternatives? On the whole... I think bypassing financial controls to enable ransomware is not an improvement on the previous system.

BTC offers censorship resistant money.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#29

Post by danielmarkbruce »

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…

Crypto isn't required for this. It doesn't even help.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#30

Post by syntheweave »

flaque wrote: post #23
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…

> “can you come up with something that will see mainstream use that eclipses the toxic speculation that's perceived to characterize every crypto application“ This is a far better question to put to crypto. The article isn’t attempting to address that question though. My bet is “yes”, at maybe 80% confidence. I would say it’s fairly difficult to see though, because speculative projects grow very quickly and dwarf “nor…

Another way to put it is that crypto, being specified as a protocol, is likely not to be the product(which is how it's promoted speculatively) but a feature of a product.

Like, HTTP isn't a product; but a web browser uses HTTP as a feature, and so do web servers. But they aren't the whole product either.

And the categorical error is that traditional finance sees its protocols as products, but they're actually on the road to commodified features. It's easy to "print new money" now, so that's not the part of the value chain that matters.

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