Where are all the crypto use cases?
evanjconrad.com
Where are all the crypto use cases?
1–10 of 273 posts
Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?
#2This 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 expensive or inconvenient.
As for this:
> 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.
The reason loans on the blockchain are cheap is not because there's no middle-man but because they're over-collateralized so there's no risk. One of the reasons the bank charges you interest is that they're taking a risk that you will not pay back the loan. AFAIK this is not possible in DeFi.
Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?
#3> Crypto is successful at being money. If you don't believe me, then I'm happy to sell you the laptop I'm writing this on for 1,000 ETH instead of 1,000 USD.
Let us know when the laptop sells.
Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?
#4This is packed full of odd arguments -
> Crypto is successful at being money. If you don't believe me, then I'm happy to sell you the laptop I'm writing this on for 1,000 ETH instead of 1,000 USD.
How about 1000 kilos of gold? Or 1000 1 Carat Diamonds? Does that make diamonds good money?
> Right now, you can take out a loan without involving a bank from one of the many crypto lending protocols.
Yes, but you over-collateralise that loan, swapping tokens around to do so. It doesn't look a lot like lending, it looks more like obfuscation of naive/fraudulent claims of productivity mixed with a game of musical chairs. And right now loan platforms in the crypto space are in all sorts of trouble. Look at "Solend" which appears to have suffered from a large token-holder taking out loans as a way to exit a cryptocurrency that was traded too thinly to cash out directly.
Multiple DeFi lending platforms are mid-collapse, right now.
I really agree with this -
> In other words, crypto's use case is the one that it claims: decentralization.
It's just that that use-case is far less universal, useful or desirable than we have been lead to believe by the cryptocurrency hype factory. For the most part nobody cares, the people putting money into cryptocurrency just want somewhere to gamble, the people not into that aspect are not lining up to use the products of this space, because of that promise. And in many cases (irreversible payments with no oversight!) it's actively bad.
> "after 13 years, there are still no use cases for crypto" is not a rational fact
How about "after 13 years there are still no use cases for crypto that aren't done better without the crypto aspect, or aren't just fucking stupid to begin with?"
Because sure, there are some things you can do with blockchains and smart contracts, but honestly, why the hell would you?
Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?
#5Excellent 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 for doing so. If you think of miners as a business, the 'customers' for miners are people submitting transactions, yet these business don't actually 'know' their customer at all. That's web3 decentralization (not silly NFTs).
Protocols like Akash allow anyone to effectively run K8S on their own infrastructure and get paid to do so... all the while, decentralizing the compute away from central locations like AWS / GCP. I personally find that concept fascinating and super cool.
Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?
#6This 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…
> One of the reasons the bank charges you interest is that they're taking a risk that you will not pay back the loan. AFAIK this is not possible in DeFi.
That's why there are options markets like, Nexus Mutual [1], that allow third parties to take on that risk.
Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?
#7This 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…
> One of the reasons the bank charges you interest is that they're taking a risk that you will not pay back the loan. AFAIK this is not possible in DeFi. That's why there are options markets like, Nexus Mutual [1], that allow third parties to take on that risk. [1] https://nexusmutual.io/
Unless I'm missing something here, this is insurance, not lending.
Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?
#8If 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 people who really want to replace S3, but I very much do doubt that there's a critical mass of them.
The question being put to crypto isn't "can you come up with something that it can do"; it's "can you come up with something that will see mainstream use that eclipses the toxic speculation that's perceived to characterize every crypto application".
I don't claim to have a dispositive argument here, but I also don't think crypto advocates do either.
Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One of the reasons the bank charges you interest is that they're taking a risk that you will not pay back the loan. AFAIK this is not possible in DeFi. That's why there are options markets like, Nexus Mutual [1], that allow third parties to take on that risk. [1] https://nexusmutual.io/
Unless I'm missing something here, this is insurance, not lending.
Both products are lotteries with premiums.
Re: Where are all the crypto use cases?
#10Helium as an incentive for the LoRaWAN network is the killer app for crypto. People are building a world wide LoT network. It's all decentralized. It's all being created by people who earn helium as a reward. I think the same model can be duplicated for other needs. If we give it time we'll see more solutions being created using the same model.