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The endless search for a crypto use case

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Re: The endless search for a crypto use case

#61

Post by silentsea90 »

snapcaster wrote: post #3

I mean it has good use cases they're not just the ones that scheme promoters want to be true. I know TFA pokes some holes in the censorship resistance attribute of bitcoin but i think everyone can agree it does provide value transfer solution that is much harder to block than Visa/Stripe/etc. 1). Silk Road or dark net markets in general. Can't be done with Visa or other existing solutions at any kind of scale 2). Fun…

The biggest use case for Bitcoin is of it being an escape from arbitrary printing of money by central banks. The richer your home country, the further you are from intuitively grasping how catastrophic printing is in the long run.

Re: The endless search for a crypto use case

#63

Post by TremendousJudge »

olalonde wrote: post #14

To me, the fact that Bitcoin is a money out of the hands of governments, or anyone really, is the use case. It's also cool that you can use your brain to effectively store your money. Of course, if you believe that governments are good stewards of money, you will probably not find a use case.

Is it really? If you can't change it for goods and services before turning it back into regular, government controlled currency, is it out of the hands of governments? If China can get all the miners to move to Kazakhstan, were they ever out of government control?

Re: The endless search for a crypto use case

#64

Post by jostiniane »

sudden_dystopia wrote: post #8

There is only one use case and that is the originally intended use, as a currency completely decoupled from any one country’s monetary meddling and thus liberating the populace from poor central planners and/or authoritarians. That’s it. That’s all there is to it.

Definitely. Somehow the author went and brought valid arguments against ETH and web3 but failed completely at point #2.

Just to answer the author concerns about point #2. There are coins with entire Blockchain that can fit in my OnePlus 7. I am from Algeria (a country without a financial system), LTC and XMR are the coins that brought me out of poverty, not because of gambling but they allowed me to do software development consulting online without begging services like Wise to not ban my account for random suspicions.

The author somehow talks about Crypto currency but somehow keeps pointing to flaws in exchangers with KYC.. Again, a lot of progress has been made here, exchangers without KYC emerged (check out Bisq net)...

I just wish people would point out more honest reviews of the such technologies so we can improve together as a society.. Cryptocurrency might not add a lot to your life, but there are many people having access to instant, cheap and secure transactions is a game changer.. I don't care about the legality of it as those broken laws are probably not protecting the average citizen.

Re: The endless search for a crypto use case

#65

Post by toomuchtodo »

ragnot wrote: post #56
xadhominemx wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still have no answer for the crypto on/off ramp issue.

I think the idea would be that in a scenario where crypto becomes a currency, there wouldn't need to be an off-ramp (at least immediately, think war/revolution). You would trade the crypto like "real" money.

This requires price stability, which is at odds with the use of crypto as a speculative investment vehicle. People use fiat to transact because it is stable. It’s stable because a central bank is using tools available to bring about stability.

Re: The endless search for a crypto use case

#66

Post by rvz »

pavlov wrote: post #23
bnchrch wrote: post #11

I mean I see two clear use cases. 1. Transferring funds I can transfer crypto faster and a lot cheaper than any money transfer. Hell I can receive and withdraw same day. 2. Earning interest By parking my money in a stable coin and dropping it into an AMM like uniswap I can earn 10x-50x more interest than just parking it in my bank account. No volatility. Only risk is hacker risk.

Re: 1), I can transfer money within the Eurozone at no cost, 24/7, practically instantaneous. It's really hard for any crypto solution to beat that. For non-Euro transfers, I regularly send USD wires and they clear the same day. The fees are a fixed $25 (so 0.25% for a $10k transfer), which IMO is reasonable. Re: 2), uhh, yeah. I think that's what Celsius users believed too.

> It's really hard for any crypto solution to beat that.

Not really.

One can do that with either XRP, Stellar, or Algorand blockchains with has virtually little to no fees, much faster and far cheaper than a wire transfer, all worldwide.

Perhaps is that why Moneygram realised that Stellar was a great use-case for their service? [0]

[0] https://stellar.org/moneygram

Re: The endless search for a crypto use case

#67

Post by silentsea90 »

rvz wrote: post #27
all2well wrote: post #16

This article doesn't mention the one article of faith every crypto utopian I've run into really believes: the US dollar and every other currency will collapse soon and be replaced by crypto.

And on the other side of the ring, we have the anti-crypto absolutists who will do anything to: 'ban all crypto, 100%' , 'destroy all of it' , 'let it all die in a fire' , which I'm afraid is as equally delusional as the crypto utopians who believing that Bitcoin will be the world reserve currency. The truth of the matter is, both of these extreme camps are going to be very disappointed in the future.

What makes you think BTC utopians are going to be disappointed?

Re: The endless search for a crypto use case

#68

Post by notafraudster »

sinecure wrote: post #52

The cleanest and easiest use case I see for crypto is just optimizing the whole securities issuance and fund management legacy system. For my business in alternative investments if I want to raise money for a project with a Regulation D offering I need to spend a lot of time and money jumping through hoops and dealing with numerous financial institutions. The typical flow of information, effort and money goes like th…

But on a fundamental level you're not describing a technical hurdle, you're describing a social-policy hurdle. Like, wouldn't you agree that if there was policymaker will to make this process more efficient, it could be more efficient without a blockchain?

Suppose that blockchain did not exist but that securities law did not require you to consult securities attorneys to "create the investment opportunity". You would have an efficiency gain by cutting out the attorneys.

In particular I think about your "dream": you dream that in lieu of paying people with a mixture of direct deposit and paper checks, you could pay them with an electronic currency; but presumably at least some of the people being paid with paper checks want to be paid with paper checks (if not, you'd presumably pay them all with direct deposit) and while securities law probably doesn't let you disburse via Paypal or Venmo or any other electronic account transfer, if it did, doing so would be approximately the same as USDC, right?

It seems to me to make a sustainable case for blockchain, you need to basically say assuming the exact same regulatory posture and the exact same degree of technical laziness in terms of automating steps not currently automated, would blockchain make it better?

Re: The endless search for a crypto use case

#69

Post by whitepaint »

Ens domains, PoolTogether, Aave and more: https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/

Have these people writing these kind of articles ever downloaded a browser wallet and played around with Defi? The amount of ignorance here is staggering. How is it on HN? HN is supposed to be a place for people who are tech savvy and are able to think about the future and imagine it different from yesterday.

Re: The endless search for a crypto use case

#70

Post by aNoob7000 »

silentsea90 wrote: post #61
snapcaster wrote: post #3

I mean it has good use cases they're not just the ones that scheme promoters want to be true. I know TFA pokes some holes in the censorship resistance attribute of bitcoin but i think everyone can agree it does provide value transfer solution that is much harder to block than Visa/Stripe/etc. 1). Silk Road or dark net markets in general. Can't be done with Visa or other existing solutions at any kind of scale 2). Fun…

The biggest use case for Bitcoin is of it being an escape from arbitrary printing of money by central banks. The richer your home country, the further you are from intuitively grasping how catastrophic printing is in the long run.

The problem with Bitcoin is that it is a pain to transact any business with it.
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