Excellent article for once. Another one is decentralized compute. AWS pioneered taking unused compute and commoditizing it. Well, there is a lot of unused compute in the world and building ways to take advantage of it is part of what I see 'web3' as being about. PoW mining, however "wasteful", is still a great example of allowing anyone to effectively participate in the validation of transactions and getting rewarded…
I had not heard of Akash before. So I pay real dollars to setup and run a K8S cluster and people pay me in funny money to host their app on it? Looking at the calculator[0] the price fluctuates quite a bit. The 30 day average is 1 AKT/$0.35 while the current price is $0.215. [0]: https://akash.praetorapp.com/calculator
Where are all the crypto use cases?
81–90 of 273 posts
Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
>You can't use these "DeFi loans" to buy a house in the real world. Sure you can. Take out a loan, convert it to USD at an exchange, withdraw into your bank account, buy a house.
Only if you already had the money equivalent in the first place. Whatever you used as collateral will be something the other side would have gladly bought for the same amount. It's a speculative transaction between you and the other side that is completely unrelated to the house. In real life, the collateral for the loan you use to buy a house is that house itself, something you did not own before (and arguably not b…
Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?
#83Earlier 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…
> You can't use these "DeFi loans" to buy a house in the real world. You can if the person selling the house agrees to accept the token (likely some form of stablecoin). Whether that matches your definition of 'real world' or not, these things have happened already. We will probably see less of this in the US, but I can imagine someone in another country gladly accepting tokens. I don't see why this is so far fetched…
Because you've fetched it far with "I can imagine someone gladly accepting tokens for a house"
Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?
#84This 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…
As a peer comment says, collaterlised lending is very popular in traditional finance to avoid taxable events and gain leverage.
There are plenty of critiques around Crypto but this isn’t one of them.
Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Because it avoided the central bank, they could avoid the stealing of their hard currency via the standard international payment system. How much was paid in fees in total, from your currency to theirs (I assume VND)? If it's a USD stablecoin, I assume they still had to convert it to VND, or at least they'd have to if they were paid mostly like this (to pay their taxes). Wise and others are quite cheap for the curr…
I’m extremely deep in this space, so I will provide some more anecdotes. A lot of the Chinese crypto engineers (of which there are many) are paid in USDT. This avoids all of the capital controls and knowledge the state has. There is an entire subculture of Chinese who operate their businesses in USDT, mostly digital ones but it has bled into the physical world as well. In Hong Kong duffel bags full of paper currency…
So. Illegal movement of money.
Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?
#86Earlier 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…
> You can't use these "DeFi loans" to buy a house in the real world. You can if the person selling the house agrees to accept the token (likely some form of stablecoin). Whether that matches your definition of 'real world' or not, these things have happened already. We will probably see less of this in the US, but I can imagine someone in another country gladly accepting tokens. I don't see why this is so far fetched…
Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?
#87Earlier 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?
If you are a starter, how do you buy crypto without credit card, bank account or similar?
I have a lot of experience in the Vietnam market. Most people there don't have credit cards, but they do have bank accounts and can easily buy crypto from a variety of sites... binance, remitano, localbitcoins, bitcoinvn, etc...
Once you get outside the US, a lot of things open up quite a bit. Especially in developing nations.
Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
The counter argument might be that Ford F-150s aren't particularly fungible. A slightly stronger example might be gold, but people don't use gold as money anymore either.
Fungible + trades at greater than one usd also includes, for example, aapl shares. Still well short of the mark.
Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Crypto isn't required for this. It doesn't even help.
Smart contracts is what makes it possible.
Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?
#90Earlier 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…
You can post collateral, borrow coins, convert to Fiat and spend the borrowed money on what you like. Sounds like a (collateralised) loan to me? As a peer comment says, collaterlised lending is very popular in traditional finance to avoid taxable events and gain leverage. There are plenty of critiques around Crypto but this isn’t one of them.
This is a highly specialised use-case unlike a normal loan. And the collateral for this is as difficult to obtain as the cash you'd like to borrow in the first place. [EDIT: More difficult because the "loan" is over-collateralised!]
> There are plenty of critiques around Crypto but this isn’t one of them.
No. It's a perfectly good critique of how DeFi people abuse the word "loan".