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Where are all the crypto use cases?

evanjconrad.com

211–220 of 273 posts

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

By the dot-com crash in 2000, there were a myriad of clear use cases for the Internet that normal people—those not particularly tech-savvy, and especially not those directly financially invested in Internet companies —used and recognized as very helpful. Bitcoin has now been around for, what, 13 years? And aside from a very brief explosion of hype around NFTs that most people were fairly quickly able to recognize as…

It was interesting how quickly the cloud providers got rid of their block chain offerings.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The issue is you can't put up the house you're going to buy as collateral for a DeFi loan. Of course not, you don't own it.

Do you understand what a mortgage is? You put up the house you're buying as collateral for a loan for the money you're using to buy the house.

Sorry, I guess my word timing sarcasm was missed. You kind of have to buy the house and get the mortgage at the same time. "going to buy" was said multiple times, which implies that the house wasn't purchased yet.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not picking a side, just pointing out that you disagree with almost every expert on the planet. The beauty of crypto is that if you don't like this feature of crypto, you don't have to use it. Everyone gets what they want! The "experts" who prefer inflationary currency can keep using that, and people who don't want their money inflated can choose otherwise.

Or... there are reasons nobody does that. You do realize deflationary "currency" disincentivizes spending, right?

> Or... there are reasons nobody does that.

Like I said, the great part about crypto is that if you have personal reasons to prefer inflationary currencies you can feel free to use those instead.

And those who don't want their money inflated away, are free to choose otherwise.

Everyone wins! You can prefer inflation for your own money as much as you want. And those who don't want inflation for their own money, can choose differently.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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?

Because you can use a central authority (ie, company, any organization really). "Distributed computing" doesn't mean no central authority. With a central authority it's easier to build and has lower transaction costs.

If someone has a bank account, they can get paid, in your scheme. They don't need a credit card.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#216

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?

Because you can use a central authority (ie, company, any organization really). "Distributed computing" doesn't mean no central authority. With a central authority it's easier to build and has lower transaction costs. If someone has a bank account, they can get paid, in your scheme. They don't need a credit card.

Sorry, that doesn't answer my question at all.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the dot-com crash in 2000, there were a myriad of clear use cases for the Internet that normal people—those not particularly tech-savvy, and especially not those directly financially invested in Internet companies —used and recognized as very helpful. Bitcoin has now been around for, what, 13 years? And aside from a very brief explosion of hype around NFTs that most people were fairly quickly able to recognize as…

It was interesting how quickly the cloud providers got rid of their block chain offerings.

Have they? It looks like Azure, AWS, and CloudFlare still have their blockchain services, and Google still maintains Ethereum-ETL. GCP made a big push into the space earlier this year with a dedicated team (but not much has come of that yet).

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you understand what a mortgage is? You put up the house you're buying as collateral for a loan for the money you're using to buy the house.

Sorry, I guess my word timing sarcasm was missed. You kind of have to buy the house and get the mortgage at the same time. "going to buy" was said multiple times, which implies that the house wasn't purchased yet.

Well this is why having humans in the loop is an advantage, so you get an Agreement in Principle to move the process forward.

Also, we're back to the fundamental problem which is that you can't use a house as collateral on the blockchain but you can in the real world.

There are also things like leveraged buyouts of companies which operate on a similar principle. The capital for the buyout is fronted by a bank loan secured against the company being bought.

And again, there's no timing issue because humans can understand there isn't really a sequencing issue and one party isn't going to just disappear with the funds halfway through the process, and everything is reversible through banking and / or the courts.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#219
post #27

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…

Defi isn’t just bullshit as far as I know, it is an actual scam that wouldn’t be allowed at banks - I’m surprised regulators haven’t shut down Defi yet. Doesn’t everyone wonder why exchanges advertise interest at 10% - 20% on deposits and at the same time advertises 0.1% loans to others. These things can’t coexist at the same and no one questions the method. What I understand they do is take your deposit and essentially lend that same deposit out 100 times over in a chain of transactions and different cryptos to pay you back interest - and then like Celsius eventually fail. How can they loan out the same cash 100 times? As far as I know, they take control of the deposit - loan that to someone and take that someone’s crypto as collateral, and then loan that collateral out taking collateral from others again, then loan that out, and so on. This is possible in the ecosystem by going between several different cryptos that all allow them to “Defi” with themselves as well. Basically they only need a very small amount of deposits to create a crazy number of loans. I won’t claim to be in the industry but this was the best explanation I’ve received yet, from essentially a leaked, on how they make money.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#220
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…

The ultimate test for a new crypto application would be to not mention anywhere that it uses crypto and completely abstract anything crypto-related away from users, then get millions of users because it does something truly useful.
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