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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?

#261

Post by nl »

brabel wrote: post #106
pfraze wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to make you repeat yourself, but we’re looking at DIDs and I’d like to know your arguments against them. Do you mind linking to a comment or summarizing?

DIDs have nothing to do with blockchains, it's just that some people are trying to hype DIDs by artificially linking them with blockchains. They use "crypto" but the "old kind", the good one: cryptography.

While DIDs do not have to link to blockchains the standard itself notes:

Many—but not all—DID methods make use of distributed ledger technology (DLT) or some other form of decentralized network.[1]

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#262

Post by Nursie »

tornato7 wrote: post #230
Nursie wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another way to put it is that crypto, being specified as a protocol, is likely not to be the product I used to say to proponents of blockchain as an enabling tech, "show me a product that relies on blockchain tech but sells itself on its amazing problem-solving features, not on the word blockchain and not on the alleged value of its attached tokens" I don't know that I've really seen such a thing yet. I stopped ask…

Here's a couple: Figure[0] provides financial services by abstracting blockchain in the backend. Koala[1] provides travel reinsurance products funded by crypto loans in the backend. 0. https://www.figure.com/ 1. https://hikoala.co/

That is interesting.

But neither is anything particularly new at the consumer end, the only difference between Koala and any other company is that they're reliant on defi lending for their funding.

And the only thing blockchainy I can find about Figure is their crypto mortgage, which is an(other) collateralised loan scheme, and it's not in action yet. I notice it was supposed to launch in April with a 100% crypto-to-loan amount. I wonder if they've had to rethink it in light of the recent crash?

If their other products are somehow blockchain (and they might be, I can see they have some sort of proprietary blockchain going on) then firstly, yes, we’ll done to them for not crowing about it and putting the product first! But secondly, again I’m not really seeing a novelty here.

And I wonder what happens to companies like Koala in the current situation, a lot of DeFi lending platforms seem to have either collapsed or be on the brink.

But I guess “crowd-funded finance”

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#263

Post by Nursie »

dubswithus wrote: post #237
Nursie wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But to do that I have to buy nano, and then you need to cash out nano to do anything useful with it. Also frankly, if I'm paying as little as 0.001 Nano, then probably I don't actually care about your article and reading it is pure procrastination on my part, so I'm likely better off not doing so. Thanks for putting up your paywall :)

It's better to pay on demand than subscribe to 10 publications that each charge $9.95 a month. This is why streaming is a bad solution for the average person.

Is it? Have you surveyed the average person?

I’m not sure it is. With a subscription I know what my monthly bill will be and can budget around it. I’m fine with streaming, and very rarely pay for an episode or series of something.

Even if it was very small amounts, my watching habits would likely be curtailed if I knew everything I watch was going to cost me.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#264

Post by nl »

tptacek wrote: post #38
nl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think self sovereign identity (ie, what Keybase did but standardized and anchored on a public blockchain rather than a private database) is an interesting consumer-facing technology that is crypto based and isn't a scam. Identity plays are tricky commercially but there do seem to be some interesting shoots of growth around it.

I'm a broken record on why I believe this is a distinctively bad use case for public blockchains, for whatever it's worth. But it doesn't matter that I think this use case is doomed; what matters is: it's not a serious mainstream thing right now. If it becomes one, you won't have to argue; it'll be self-evidently an important use case.

I went looking (!) and I found this comment[1] from you. To summarize:

> SSI has no human mediated account recovery and so is a toy.

I don't completely disagree, but it's not the take I was expecting.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29750165

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#265

Post by nl »

pfraze wrote: post #42
tptacek wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a broken record on why I believe this is a distinctively bad use case for public blockchains, for whatever it's worth. But it doesn't matter that I think this use case is doomed; what matters is: it's not a serious mainstream thing right now. If it becomes one, you won't have to argue; it'll be self-evidently an important use case.

Sorry to make you repeat yourself, but we’re looking at DIDs and I’d like to know your arguments against them. Do you mind linking to a comment or summarizing?

I think it was this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29750165

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#266

Post by whatisweb3 »

dmitriid wrote: post #241
whatisweb3 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure they do - these protocols define digital assets that can be owned in a non-custodial manner, and exchanged and escrowed via peer-to-peer mechanisms without fear of double-spend. These are the goals of the protocols, and both BTC and ETH have succeeded wildly at doing this specific task, facilitating billions of dollars worth of transfers for several years without any notable record of a double-spend or network downtime.

This says nothing about their USD spot trading price, or the practicality of securing large amounts of wealth with a 24-word private key, or the expectation that these technologies should somehow replace all corners of the world's financial transactions.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#267

Post by hiq »

koonsolo wrote: post #246
hiq wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-...

> you can run a node for $20 a month

So that's one more entry in your accounting, how many more are there? Once you've counted everything and implemented all the missing features (e.g. how much does it cost to do USD -> NANO -> NANO -> USD), do you still have something that costs less to run than a payment processor?

My only point is that "0 transaction fee so that's better than traditional solutions" is misleading, because of hidden costs, missing features, unknown regulatory risk, etc. The technical part and its efficiency is interesting, but just one variable in the equation, and not even one that major payment processors couldn't replicate at a whim if it did bring any value.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#268

Post by stale2002 »

guerrilla wrote: post #251
stale2002 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ch…

> personal reasons You seem confused. Societal collapsing vs. non-societal collapsing currencies are not "personal." You're confounding preference and outcome. Deflationary "money" isn't money, which is exactly what we see in all of your experiments, exactly as predicted.

> Deflationary "money" isn't money, which is exactly what we see in all of your experiments, exactly as predicted.

You can call it whatever you want, but the point is that you don't have to use this "deflationary money, which isn't money", and other people who do want this deflationary aspect of their money can use it though.

You can simply use your inflationary money that goes down in value, if you don't want to use deflationary "fake money", and people who instead want deflation in their "fake money", can use it because thats what those people choose to do.

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#269

Post by scott_w »

whatisweb3 wrote: post #206
scott_w wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The statement always takes the form: there are no use cases that aren’t better solved by (some centralized company). 2 things: 1. No it doesn’t. 2. Nobody cares. “Centralised” isn’t a problem. If it causes problems you need to demonstrate that and then show how blockchain solves that problem and how existing solutions can’t. I’ve seen no examples of that (Uniswap isn’t an example).

> No it doesn’t. This statement verbatim is regularly repeated on HN - users pointing to Stripe, PayPal, Venmo, Apple, whatever as being better solutions than the proposed crypto/web3 ideas. > “Centralised” isn’t a problem. Not for you, maybe. Some users will be happy to manage the additional complexity and risks of handling non-custodial assets on Ethereum L2s in order to achieve lower fees and take-rates, privacy p…

> A very simple example is a domain name. Outside of blockchain networks, we have no mechanism for non-custodial ownership and peer-to-peer transfer of a domain name asset - like you would exchange cash where two parties simply swap the bills directly without the need for a third-party to oversee the exchange and potentially extract rent.

Prove it’s a problem

Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?

#270

Post by whatisweb3 »

scott_w wrote: post #269
whatisweb3 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No it doesn’t. This statement verbatim is regularly repeated on HN - users pointing to Stripe, PayPal, Venmo, Apple, whatever as being better solutions than the proposed crypto/web3 ideas. > “Centralised” isn’t a problem. Not for you, maybe. Some users will be happy to manage the additional complexity and risks of handling non-custodial assets on Ethereum L2s in order to achieve lower fees and take-rates, privacy p…

> A very simple example is a domain name. Outside of blockchain networks, we have no mechanism for non-custodial ownership and peer-to-peer transfer of a domain name asset - like you would exchange cash where two parties simply swap the bills directly without the need for a third-party to oversee the exchange and potentially extract rent. Prove it’s a problem

User Alice and Bob want to swap domain names they own, but using an escrow to facilitate the trade safely and mitigate counterparty risk - and they want to do this instantly, without sharing private data online, and without paying a % commission to a rent extracting corporate third party entity.

Blockchain enables this use case, for a small fixed fee that is directed to users upholding the protocol - which may include Alice and Bob themselves as token holders and block producers.

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