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I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

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Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#241

Post by stevenjgarner »

hnthrow1010 wrote: post #231
stevenjgarner wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both. I do quite a bit of offshoring in Central and South America (and elsewhere). If I make payment to contractors in Colombia for example, the recipients have severe restrictions on spending that money outside their country if it is in USD or pesos. Hence crypto. This does not even address the huge number of "unbanked" people in the US who have to pay a fortune in fees for their payments to family back "home" - cry…

Crypto isn't helping there, that's just another form of regulatory arbitrage. If you're exchanging the crypto for USD or pesos anyway then what you're doing is still probably illegal.

I'm just paying independent contractors with crypto. How could that possibly be illegal? What the contractor does with the crypto is not under my control.

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#242

Post by hnthrow1010 »

toolz wrote: post #200
Scoundreller wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually in stone (buildings/sheds), farmland, or readily usable goods that keep well/provide value (rice, dry beans, generator, fridge). Sucks if you need to run though. But usually if you're wealthy in an unwealthy/poorly banked country and can't leave for some reason, you keep your assets in the place you'd run to if you really had to.

all of those things are fine and good, but they aren't something you can easily put your savings into - you have to save up to buy most of that stuff, and you can't just horde physical items without necessary storage and protection. Further for some people these things all pose substantially more risk than bitcoin. If someone burns your sheds down or salts your farmland because you can't payoff the local rebels, you…

That has nothing to do with bitcoin specifically though. What you're describing is either someone using another currency or using some kind of digital payment system. It doesn't have to be cryptos.

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#243

Post by hnthrow1010 »

stevenjgarner wrote: post #241
hnthrow1010 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto isn't helping there, that's just another form of regulatory arbitrage. If you're exchanging the crypto for USD or pesos anyway then what you're doing is still probably illegal.

I'm just paying independent contractors with crypto. How could that possibly be illegal? What the contractor does with the crypto is not under my control.

But if you could pay them in USD or pesos, you would? Can't you see how the government would take an issue with that, the very same issue that they have with USD or pesos?

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#244

Post by simonw »

gitanes wrote: post #195
simonw wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this a lot. I want details: - Which countries? - What portion of the population are benefiting from crypto? Is it a tiny portion of nerds or has it become more mainstream now? - With the crash in cryptocurrency over the last few months are these people in those countries still glad that they used this, or are they regretting it? I don't doubt that there exist individuals in countries with high inflation who ha…

Argentina. 100% of annual inflation. People use crypto everyday to get money in and out of the economy.

Argentina does look like the most interesting country to dig deeper into here.

As always with crypto stuff, a big challenge is finding trustworthy news outlets. I generally don't trust stories from the crypto press.

Found this on the BBC from one of their foreign correspondents (hence someone who will be held to BBC editorial and conflict-of-interest standards): https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789

It does note that: "So far it is the preserve of a minority - largely a young, male, tech-savvy, and relatively affluent population. It's tech workers, not farmers, who are being paid in Bitcoin."

That story is also from April. I'd like to see updated coverage now that the crypto market has crashed. How many people in Argentina got burned badly by that?

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#245

Post by rvz »

krade wrote: post #137
rvz wrote: post #17

> Money transfer use-cases would fall directly in the category of “crypto-only”. For as long as Bitcoin has existed, this has been touted as a great use-case — but it never really materialised. So Stellar and MoneyGram are not 'Money Transfer Use Cases' ? [0] If not, why did they partner on this in the first place if they didn't think this was a possible or a feasible use case? On NFTs, Blockchain domains like ENS (E…

did you even read the moneygram PR? "Consumers can now go into a MoneyGram location to either load their digital wallets to access the digital economy, or cash-out their digital currencies to increase the utility of their holdings." So the real world use-case for Moneygram is to exchange cryptocurrency for cash and vice versa. How exactly does this refute his point? And having blockchain domains that can only be acce…

> did you even read the moneygram PR?

First of all, I hope you read the guidelines. [0]

   Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
> So the real world use-case for Moneygram is to exchange cryptocurrency for cash and vice versa. How exactly does this refute his point?

Whilst you were reading it, Did you ignore this?

>> The partnership focuses on delivering a service that revolutionizes the settlement process. For the first time, settlement with MoneyGram will occur in near-real-time using USDC, one of the world's fastest growing dollar digital currencies. This enables an accelerated collection of funds, improving efficiencies and reducing risks.

The claim: "Money transfer use-cases would fall directly in the category of “crypto-only”. For as long as Bitcoin has existed, this has been touted as a great use-case — but it never really materialized."

Indeed, Bitcoin cannot be used for that use case for a number of obvious reasons and it seems that Moneygram, Stellar, etc partnered for that use-case, otherwise that solution would not exist. The author seems to be trying their hardest to narrow the goal post for this one.

> And having blockchain domains that can only be accessed using a particular dns, a VPN service, certain browsers or having to install an extension is hilarious.

So that means you can't use it today and it is 'not a use case'? Perhaps it's 'hilarious' for users today especially those in either Russia or Ukraine to download a specific browser or extension to access the Tor Network or .onion links. Seems like all these users defending it don't see that as a problem? [1]. Beacon browser (Chromium derivative) does the same thing for Handshake, ENS domains: https://impervious.com/beacon

Assuming you have read the whole article in [2]:

Can you seize a Handshake / ETH domain away just like a private equity attempted to do for a .org domain? Surely they [3] saw that as a problem and were crying about it.

> "Handshake domain names provide true ownership. Which means there are yearly renewal fees"

The mining fees for a TLD are biannual and are for every 2 years and are 100,000x times cheaper compared to ICANN which is $180,000 per TLD filed for application + $5,000. But I thought you read the whole article from [2] which you failed to cite this. Clearly you did not.

If you want 'true' ownership, you will also find that in [4] that a Handshake TLD can be locked and verified in a decentralised registry forever [3] which has virtually zero renewal fees.

So once again, there's seems to be a valid use case in blockchain domains. Especially with the use-case in payments directly to readable names rather than unreadable addresses.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32288058

[2] https://learn.namebase.io/about-handshake/about-handshake

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677

[4] https://registry.impervious.com

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#246

Post by yokem55 »

testesttest wrote: post #55
tux3 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storing the list is the easy part. I have a usb drive that can store the list. You want people to agree on which chain is the main chain, so that you can only add things to the list, and you can't go back or substitute it with another list without breaking proof of work. The purpose of bitcoin is to make people agree that a spent transaction is irrevocably spent.

Have you tried storing the list lately? I don't think you have a 10TB plus flash drive. https://etherscan.io/chartsync/chainarchive Crypto is more and more centralised because the hardware to run your own node is now thousands of dollars. That is without even getting into miners...It is kinda failing.

This chart is kind of dated and misleading at the moment.

1) You don't need an archive node to fully verify the current state of the chain. A full geth node in full sync mode (about 600gb) will process every transaction of every block and get you the current state. You only need an archive node if you want the history of each account and contract separately indexed.

2) Folks that do want an archive node can now use much more space efficient clients then geth such as erigon (1.4tb) or besu (1.2 tb) if they want to run a block explorer or query the state of an account in the past.

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#247

Post by influxmoment »

cowtools wrote: post #28
influxmoment wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wrong. Blockchains validate data. Their purpose isn't to store it. Mostly the answer to do you need a blockchain is no

The purpose of bitcoin, for example, is not to store a list of transactions?

There were actually blockchain updates proposed that didn't store transactions (see mimblewimble) but they had other issues so were not used

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#248

Post by stevenjgarner »

Fezzik wrote: post #232
rvz wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There you go. Not only crypto-skeptics can't be bothered to do basic research and even finish reading the entire PYMNTS article and click the 'Download report' link at the end of the article to see and verify the citations and methodology for themselves, instead they continue to pull out anecdotes, assumptions and at worse fallacies to deny reports like this one because 'all crypto bad', or 'all blockchain bad' nonse…

I read the whole thing, including the survey results summary, but nowhere do I see how a survey of 2,000 of their own subscribers can be magnified to “represent” three million people. That methodology is not mentioned anywhere that I can see. And while I am definitely not a statistician this seems like massaging the numbers to an extraordinary degree. I certainly have no doubt that a portion of the 2,000 people surve…

Whatever the audited data might be, there is a significant population of people in many countries around the world using crypto as a currency, not as an investment. At the end of the day, that may be its true value/demand. I have no doubt that regulators will do their best to make that more and more difficult, but the net effect of that seems to only enhance its value as a currency.

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#249

Post by seibelj »

yao420 wrote: post #219
seibelj wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely true - binance plus stablecoins is how the economy works there.

Any proof? Have you personally seen and used it? Seeing as you’re the CTO of a nft company you clearly have bias.

I’ve been in this space for a long time, know a lot of people. Lebanon is another country that is heavily using crypto. You will see a lot of countries with corrupt governments and central banks become bottom-up crypto centric, but this won’t be reported for a long time until suddenly the NYT will release an article and only then it is “actually” happening.

Here’s an informative episode on a podcast if you actually care https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-bitcoin-standard-p...

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#250

Post by hnthrow1010 »

boppo1 wrote: post #236
spicymaki wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is bitcoin an investment or a currency? I don't think it can be both. If the value of bitcoin as speculative asset is going to rise, then it is best to not spend it, but to hoard it. If everyone is hoarding bitcoin how can you use it to buy things? If it is a currency then it needs to have a stable value. If the value stabilizes, then no one will want to invest in it. Since it does not have any "real" commodity value…

I agree that bitcoin needs to decide whether to be an investment or a commodity of exchange. > If everyone is hoarding bitcoin how can you use it to buy things? When people need something more than bitcoin, they'll trade for it. Food, shelter, medicine, etc. People will certainly trade for these things. But maybe they'll pass on replacing a phone that's only 2 years old or getting an xbox or 6 pack of beer. It's fasc…

>You're so against people hoarding, i.e. saving money?

The problem with this kind of system: It's not just about saving. What's actually happening is those who have saved more are accumulating even more money by doing nothing, and everyone else who needs to spend it to buy food and shelter is suddenly losing more and more of their money. When it starts happening at a faster rate than the economy is producing actual value then you hit hyperdeflation and the economy spirals.

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