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Where are all the crypto use cases?

evanjconrad.com

241–250 of 273 posts

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#241
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…

Why does Uniswap need to replace all of our exchanges within a two year timespan in order to be seen as useful, novel, and interesting tech? When was the last time you applied this standard to the rest of our technology? HN can admit that Tor, Scuttlebutt, 3D printing, text-to-image GANs is interesting and useful tech, despite it not taking over average users daily lives. The basic premises of crypto are to be decent…

> to be decentralized and permissionless systems that support peer-to-peer forms of exchange and ownership, and they largely succeed in their defined goals.

They... they don't succeed. Like, at all. Except for a tiny bit in their own digital bubbles where everything is defined in crypto. And even there it's highly questionable.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t realize promoting free speech, which would get you arrested and potentially murdered in China, meant you were an immoral person. But with absolute government control over the payment rails, such activism is impossible without a sword over your neck.

Aren't North Korean Hackers using crypto for ransomware? So actually, crypto is used to finance and prop-up such dictatorial governments. Also, Russia is being sanctioned through freezing their USD accounts and imposing financial sanctions such as suspension from using SWIFT. If crypto is more wide-spread, then it will become more difficult to impose such financial restrictions to Russia and other international paria…

Yeah, North Korean hackers steal money on the internet. You are right about that.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> negligible for any operation over a thousand dollars. So, useless on a day to day use for any normal person that's not a Silicon Valley tech bro, understood.

The topic was about loans. How often do you need a loan for under 1k dollars?

Extremely often if you're not wealthy? Borrowing money from family to pay for car repairs, from friends for various purchases, from your bank whenever there's even a little thing you hadn't expected and you do not have money aside.

Which is, you know, 90+% of the world

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is even Brave/BAT ecosystem? The ask was for mainstream usecases, not some unknown acronyms.

https://brave.com/transparency/ * 60 million monthly active users https://basicattentiontoken.org/growth/ * 10 million users opted into rewards Brave pays users for their attention while blocking ads and tracking. Brave is not unknown on HN. There are a lot of posts about it that make the front page.

You need to remember that the entire crypto crowd (dev, preachers, fans, intellectuals, philosophers, gamblers, ...) are all a tiny, tiny minority on this planet. Tokens?? Are they some round plastic pieces given at fun rides? If they are so damn well-known, why is not a house-hold name such as amazon, netflix, facebook etc? Come out of your silly crypto rabbit hole and experience the real world.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#245
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

"incoherent word salad" is a tautology... "word salad" is already incoherent.

What if it's a salad of incoherent words? :)

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#246
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of Open Source projects rely on volunteering one way or another. I think projects where everything is publicly available, have the least risk to disappear. If you want it, you can just run it. There is of course always a cost for a transaction one way or another, but it still stands that you pay 0 for the transaction itself.

> Lots of Open Source projects rely on volunteering one way or another. How many of them without any corporate backing have the same requirements as a payment processor? > There is of course always a cost for a transaction one way or another, but it still stands that you pay 0 for the transaction itself. Again that's not the full picture, just take the Uber example. If they had made rides free thanks to VC money, wou…

Ah come on, you can run a node for $20 a month, that's way cheaper for an entreprise than sharing revenue with a payment processor. Running a node is dirt cheap, because a transaction is dirt cheap at 0.000112 kWh per transaction.

https://blog.nano.org/how-to-run-a-node-and-why-a-full-nano-...

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#247
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about the very early days, but since 1990 Internet adoption (globally) has only gone up. Some stocks crashed, some specific sites went away, but the people involved just reorganized and made even more successful businesses. If 50%+ of Internet users decided to disconnect that could cause some real problems.

Hasn't crypto adoption also generally only gone up? https://financesonline.com/number-of-blockchain-wallet-users...

We are talking about a hypothetical future where the speculation interest goes away.

The poster I was responding to thought that would make room for more pragmatic applications but I'm not so sure.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#248
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who spout incoherent word salad I affectionally call it crypto-babble. > critics describe what it does better than its advocates Seems to be true of pretty much all crypto. Most of the advocates have a very poor understanding of how it works, what the benefits/tradeoffs are and worst of all a complete ignorance of the systems they are seeking to "replace". As a result we see all the crypto stuff simply repeat mista…

Most of the discussion about HN is not about technicalities of smart contracts or block times or ledgers. The skeptics are interested in repeating the same lines but have a very poor understanding of how it works.

That is much less of a problem than the reverse scenario.

Being sceptical of something doesn't necessitate a strong understanding, being an advocate does, or at least should.

Remember the existing systems work and thus far crypto isn't offering anything new, just alternatives with different trade-offs. That places an awfully high burden of proof on any crypto advocate and such a bar is far from being reached.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#249
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dot-com bubble that crashed circa 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble I'm not convinced that crypto is like the dot-com bubble. With the early web, its use cases were fairly clear and immediate. With crypto, the use cases remain unclear and speculative even after 13 years of hype and fanfare.

I definitely wouldn't have thought to call the 00's "early internet" but that's maybe just me :)

It was early web anyway. The first web browser was released in 1993, and the first version of Netscape was released in 1994.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#250
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, i couldn't find a way to describe minitel rose in english so i went for prostitution. But it's clearly not, you're right.
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