I've sold all of my crypto for a while because it just felt like gambling. Recently I listened to the rational reminder podcast [0], where they dug up some studies that basically show that people investing in crypto think they have high financial literacy but are measurably financially illiterate. Note that the bar for financial literacy really isn't high, they discuss that in the podcast too. That really cemented my opinion about crypto.
Despite never touching crypto up until now, I feel it finally has a solid use case.
ETH’s merge along with the existence of L2 networks means it can put western Union out of business for international same party (sending money to yourself) money transfers, The KYC on both sides not withstanding.
Hell even NFTs —- the clearest feverdream tinted scam —- had a use case after all: tokens for securitizing and allowing speculation in membership networks (see Gary V coin).
Sure someone could have just made a much less wasteful self-hostable/SaaS secret club membership app but NFTs seem to have found exactly one use case as a membership mechanism du jour which enables speculation (importantly, giving people a way to profit from their early “investment” in one creator or another).
At the risk of stoking the ire of HN, does anyone still think crypto does not have a use case?
There are a lot of things it is not and has not turned out to be, but IMO the biggest issue was needlessly destroying the earth and that seems to be all but solved now.
Of course, FedNOW may prove to make crypto for money transfers an even worse option relatively but… I think we may be at the start of an actual crypto boom (where there is actually Utility underpinning ETH’s value)
Another thing I find quite exciting is the idea of trading shares via a blockchain.
While obviously becoming a financial exchange is a key choke point for innovation because of the requirements, I can imagine a shadow network based on settlements of contract negotiated with blockchain with small trusted networks of investors.
All you need is to request the stock certificates and you can actually sign them over (let’s consider this an unorthodox “settlement”). Does this mean that we have a substrate for person to person hawala systems (which are normally outlawed by the government?)
I've been hearing the Western Union usurper argument since 2010. I doubt any of the people making those arguments actually use those services.
There's an ease of use aspect to it that crypto boosters simply cannot understand, because they are used to dealing with a dizzying array of exchanges, cold wallets and nonsensical alphanumeric strings, and think that this is the UX that regular people will accept.
I have used Bitcoin sporadically in that very niche. I'm probably an exception, and I'm in the nerd crowd already, obviously. Some of my friends and family have indeed played around a bit with cryptocurrency, enough to be comfortable receiving some Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the easiest way to send money to some of them, practically speaking.
I'm in Canada. They're in the United States. They don't have PayPal. Bitcoin is actually one of the few options available. Sending just $40 of funds internationally, when either or both parties don't have a US dollar account, or even a bank account, and definitely no PayPal account, is potentially quite difficult. Money transfer? Except Western Union is also difficult to work with sometimes. Last time I called for identity verification, they seemed not to comprehend I was not in the United States, and I couldn't get it sent. Fees are brutal, too, at easily 20% for a small amount. So, potentially difficult enough, that even the headache of cryptocurrency starts to look attractive.
I absolutely agree it’s not ready for regular people to use.
> I've been hearing the Western Union usurper argument since 2010. I doubt any of the people making those arguments actually use those services.
I know you weren’t talking about me but I’ve actually used western Union, and while it wasn’t bad, it wasn’t a particularly pleasant nor pain free experience either. Wise is EXCELLENT though.
More importantly, money exchangers and check caching places extract a TREMENDOUS toll on people who are forced to use them, and the prospect that could change is actually pretty good.
Up until now the main issue was the wastefulness and lack of scale/purpose fit of blockchain. It seems like ETH is poised to solve those things where BTC was stuck due to the interests of miners.
There are problems, but it really does feel like blockchain might have just finished it’s infancy (the scam era, let’s say).
Maybe I should publish something longer form on this. I had something written then chose to self censor
Once the fundamental underpinnings are well-established, expect a UX renaissance. Everyone knows the current UX is dogshit.
Either way, the table-stakes for digital and financial literacy in the modern world are rapidly changing, and we should be prepared for some increased level of baseline complexity in the coming decades.
> Despite never touching crypto up until now, I feel it finally has a solid use case.
I'd reword this as "I finally feel it has a solid use case", as the use case of "put western Union out of business for international same party money transfers" has been present since day one.
You're just now understanding that it takes time for complex software systems to mature and reach their goals. Next time a novel system appears, this reframing of your mentality might help you to see the benefits earlier on and become an early adopter.
> I'd reword this as "I finally feel it has a solid use case", as the use case of "put western Union out of business for international same party money transfers" has been present since day one.
This is true, that was badly worded. Maybe something like "the few use cases that make sense to me have finally become guilt-free".
> You're just now understanding that it takes time for complex software systems to mature and reach their goals. Next time a novel system appears, this reframing of your mentality might help you to see the benefits earlier on and become an early adopter.
But I still don't necessarily want to be an early adopter in every piece of technology. I'm perfectly content to let people find the sharp edges and report back -- and either way up until now it was an absolute no for me with the environmental impact (knowing that PoS was possible) and rampant low-grade scams.
> international same party (sending money to yourself) money transfers
But you've not sent money to yourself, you've sent Eth to yourself, and you still need a forex transaction on each end?
> Does this mean that we have a substrate for person to person hawala systems (which are normally outlawed by the government?)
I've thought of crypto as "hawala banking for geeks" for a while now, but if it's banned by the government then inserting extra steps does not fix that and if you become big enough they will come after you for money laundering.
Why do you want to trade shares via a blockchain rather than a perfectly normal broker?
> But you've not sent money to yourself, you've sent Eth to yourself, and you still need a forex transaction on each end?
True -- it cuts down on middle men though!
Also, there's the very very theoretical case of buying things in ETH/USDC/whatever else. While buying things in BTC and ETH may be a pipedream (I don't think so in the ETH case but I won't try to defend it), stable coins are quite alluring as essentially proto-FEDCoin.
There is no reason every nation won't have a coin, and they'll be traded that way. There are a lot of negative effects to more heavily digitizing the money system, but that's another discussion -- crypto is just serving as an emotionless, politics-free money transferer (of course, it is enveloped in politics still), with a different fee structure (vs. Western Union, for example).
I said this elsewhere but basically it gives us a chance to rebuild the money system. Even if what we build is bad it's not like we're being forced into it -- but if it's even a little better, the value is infinite (given infinite time).
> I've thought of crypto as "hawala banking for geeks" for a while now, but if it's banned by the government then inserting extra steps does not fix that and if you become big enough they will come after you for money laundering.
>
> Why do you want to trade shares via a blockchain rather than a perfectly normal broker?
I'm not sure the government will ever actually ban it at this point. Especially with the relatively "blessed" nature of USDC and size Coinbase has grown to (and it's market leader position). I think at this point bitcoin exists as a political tool and prepping mechanism for the complete digitization of currency. FedNOW is the first step in that direction, maybe we'll get FEDCoin later.
Brokers charge fees, and are protected by capital requirements and regulation (which also protects consumers of course!). I think a rebuild of the system gives us a chance to meaningfully improve on the system of legislation and regulation we have so far -- the second build of finance, let's say.
For example, it's unnecessarily hard to set up an ETF -- I think the middlemen, gatekeepers, and fees there could be reduced to near zero there.
> "As a fan of Hayek and Von Mises, I was fascinated by the idea of a currency free from the government's manipulation."
Monetary systems are so crucial to modern civilization that if you do set up a 'government-independent currency' then whoever has the most control over that monetary system themselves becomes a kind of de facto government. This is seen in historical studies of black-market currency systems, where things like a bottle of rum or a kilo of cocaine became effective measures of exchange (leading to the rise of organized crime in the USA in the 1920s, or the rise of drug cartels in Latin America from the 1970s onwards, which acted in reality as alternative government systems).
So, who controls bitcoin? This article points to whales and mining pools:
Money after all is a social phenomenon, and only has value because people agree it has value - although that is as true for $USD and gold as it is for bitcoin. This then raises the question of who controls those monetary systems (hint: the control system in all cases is not at all democratic in nature).
Probably the optimal global currency system (if you value stability) is the basket-of-currencies approach, in which the $USD loses its supremacy and monetary values are tied to the average values of the basket. This requires some understanding of how global central banking operates, and for that there's no better source than Nomi Prin's Collusion:
Up front: I hate crypto. I think it is stupid and any use case it has can be solved much more efficiently with existing tools.
To me this blog reads like post-breakup copium. Dude just spent two years of his life and who knows how much money trying to find a market, only to realize there isn’t one. But he is sure someone else will find it! The technology is good!
No it isn’t. And no they won’t. Admit when you are wrong and serve as a lesson to others.
I hate cryptocurrency too, but claiming that P2P technologies aren't good or don't fix problems is pretty laughable. Programs like Bittorrent and Soulseek have left media corporations quaking in their boots for decades. Cryptocurrency, despite all of it's shortcomings, is insanely resistant technology and even the most despised shitcoins will probably outlive your youngest living relatives. It's fine to loathe it, but the underpinnings of P2P technology are absolutely phenomenal, and increasingly relevant in a world where protocol trumps products.
The real conundrum of cryptocurrency is that the technology is awesome, but the social implications of ripping the safety rails off the free market is so dire that only a disillusioned nerd could advocate for it.
Peer to peer tech isn’t exclusive to cryptocurrency shenanigans. Neither is cryptography. I don’t hate these technologies. I don’t think they are useless. Quite the opposite. But the cryptocurrency/blockchain “stack” is a solution in search of a problem. I personally believe any good use case for this stack will be so hyper specific you’ll need to pay others to run copies of he ledger so you can have the consensus mechanism. But then you run into privacy issues and are better off duplicating your standard DB to some audited write only instance.
> Bittorrent and Soulseek have left media corporations quaking in their boots for decades
did they? From my understanding availability of piracy was not really the issue behind the decline in revenue e.g. we still have all p2p infrastructure going on but the media revenue is through the roof - because of streaming.
Also to me it seemed more people used file serving service e.g. megaupload to download movies / music rather than torrents..
> and increasingly relevant in a world where protocol trumps products
does not seem to describe my experience at all. Most things that I and mainstream users tend to use are based on closed products rather than protocols... I hope the trend will disappear but it does not seem like it.
There's a big difference between saying cryptocurrency (or, more broadly, blockchain) doesn't solve real-life problems and saying P2P systems don't solve real-life problems. You appear to be attacking a strawman.
> Up front: I hate crypto. I think it is stupid and any use case it has can be solved much more efficiently with existing tools.
There are no alternative to a decentralized currency. Personally, I believe that the world would be a better place with a neutral/decentralized currency but I recognize that not everyone shares this opinion. I can't say that I "hate" fiat though, that seems a bit too strong.
The best theory I have heard for why crypto is so popular besides gambling is that it is fun to think about. True engineers love working in crypto since it feels cutting edge and is more advanced than other technologies.
This might continue even after pump and dump, but will no longer be lucrative.
I think good engineers (critical thinkers + goal-oriented problem solvers) usually give up and find a better tool (i.e. without an blockchain) for the job after not too long.
There is similarly no shortage of “architecture astronauts,” and whether the greed fuels the use of the wrong tool or vice versa — it probably doesn’t matter in the end.
>I think good engineers (critical thinkers + goal-oriented problem solvers) usually give up and find a better tool
Say it one more time for the people in the back!
A lot of us are still refining/discussing the same core concepts, cryptography, distributed systems, disbursement, consensus, just in different fields without the 'coin' component attached. A lot of this tech in crypto was nothing new (blockchain, proof of work, hashing, distributed databases), but the combination of them presented new and interesting hurdles to overcome. As time passed we saw new utility for these concepts to solve other interesting problems, but the entire time being a researcher in the cryptoasset space has felt like trying to be a 'serious engineer' while your cubicle is located in a casino floor. You can't make a commit or push a draft paper without it being a market-moving action, that is a social element that a lot of industry theory just doesn't have nailed down yet, and as engineers can be very stressful. Most of us just want to solve problems and build cool things, but its hard to create novel solutions at financial gunpoint.
Really? Sure, reading the whitepapers and playing with something new for a while has been fun, but "true engineers" will realize pretty soon that there's always a better tool for every. single. usecase.
> The unfortunate truth is that the current crypto killer feature is the creation of a global, permissionless, gigantic casino of worthless digital assets. This is quite far from the ideas of decentralization, privacy, and unstoppable digital assets we read in The Sovereign Individual.
This neatly encapsulates the often tragic distinction between ideology and real-world human behaviour.
You want a currency free of state intervention, you got it. That the majority of the market chose to leverage that for building casinos is the purest essence of that freedom.
Ideology-based financial systems that rely on actors 'doing the right thing', with no regulations to incentivize/coerce such behaviour, will usually fail to achieve its own stated objectives.
Yea, who would have thought that you don’t want to build a venture on top of a currency. There is no other use case in blockchain than transferring wealth plus some quality of life features like time locks, multi signatures etc.
Just like how Skiff has being using other blockchain projects such as ENS domains as well as decentralized P2P software like IPFS to help build their product offering. [0]
After checking their github repos I’m only seeing a web mail client with metamask for auth instead of user password. It’s using a normal graphql api. Very decentral. I guess web3.0 only requires a „login with metamask“-button now.
Oh, and about the cool, very decentral drive on IPFS thing: the drive is still only on a single server, pinned by a single server. That’s how IPFS works. It it would work otherwise and they didn’t have to actually pay their storage bills, they wouldn’t limit the storage to a mediocre 10GB less-than-gdrive shit tier.
it seems he missed how those quality of life features are viable businesses on their own
there are plenty of services taking a cut from people trying to use this
multisender.app - pay/airdrop multiple people, thats it.
team.finance - broadcast to your community that you locked your tokens, instead of just saying so.
they solve a problem, they collect a cut from volume of transactions, they aren’t sitting in business development meetings around San Francisco because that’s reserved for grifters
I think OP was perfectly willing to acknowledge these other use cases:
> Crypto speculation is a vast and fast-growing market, while other use cases are small.
Simply put, cryptocurrency has turned itself into a side-pot for disillusioned and desperate investors. The 'dream' that you're being sold is the same one we pondered 10 years ago - if we add enough bureaucracy, a democratically-controlled currency is feasible!
Time has proven this wrong. Every attempt at making the '15th competing standard' ends the same way. Nobody is putting their money in cryptocurrency, and arbitrary architectural rehashes like the Ethereum Merge isn't going to drive adoption.
The first two require centralized governance to function, so putting it on a blockchain is useless. Voting requires anonymity, so putting it on a blockchain is dangerous.
The fact that blockchain is a super interesting accounting method is completely lost on the average consumer who just wants to buy food and pay bills. If crypto can't do this, it's not real currency.
And most of them intuitatively understand that making your own currency out of electrons probably won't work in the long run. Otherwise, work would become obsolete and the economy would grind to a halt.
And the speculation game is a lot like playing the lottery. Everyone can't win and if you aren't a loser yet it's only because you haven't been playing long enough.
> And most of them intuitatively understand that making your own currency out of electrons probably won't work in the long run. Otherwise, work would become obsolete and the economy would grind to a halt.
This statement has validity but I don’t think it implies what you seem to think it does.
That the continual creation of new currencies is not a globally sustainable process does not mean we should not experiment with their creation. It also does not preclude a handful of them that support valid and important if not revolutionary use cases.
Readit News
[0] [The Rational Reminder Podcast] The Expected Returns of Financial Literacy (EP.217) https://podcastaddict.com/episode/144952992 Relevant part starts at 17:40
Despite never touching crypto up until now, I feel it finally has a solid use case.
ETH’s merge along with the existence of L2 networks means it can put western Union out of business for international same party (sending money to yourself) money transfers, The KYC on both sides not withstanding.
Hell even NFTs —- the clearest feverdream tinted scam —- had a use case after all: tokens for securitizing and allowing speculation in membership networks (see Gary V coin).
Sure someone could have just made a much less wasteful self-hostable/SaaS secret club membership app but NFTs seem to have found exactly one use case as a membership mechanism du jour which enables speculation (importantly, giving people a way to profit from their early “investment” in one creator or another).
At the risk of stoking the ire of HN, does anyone still think crypto does not have a use case?
There are a lot of things it is not and has not turned out to be, but IMO the biggest issue was needlessly destroying the earth and that seems to be all but solved now.
Of course, FedNOW may prove to make crypto for money transfers an even worse option relatively but… I think we may be at the start of an actual crypto boom (where there is actually Utility underpinning ETH’s value)
Another thing I find quite exciting is the idea of trading shares via a blockchain.
While obviously becoming a financial exchange is a key choke point for innovation because of the requirements, I can imagine a shadow network based on settlements of contract negotiated with blockchain with small trusted networks of investors.
All you need is to request the stock certificates and you can actually sign them over (let’s consider this an unorthodox “settlement”). Does this mean that we have a substrate for person to person hawala systems (which are normally outlawed by the government?)
There's an ease of use aspect to it that crypto boosters simply cannot understand, because they are used to dealing with a dizzying array of exchanges, cold wallets and nonsensical alphanumeric strings, and think that this is the UX that regular people will accept.
I'm in Canada. They're in the United States. They don't have PayPal. Bitcoin is actually one of the few options available. Sending just $40 of funds internationally, when either or both parties don't have a US dollar account, or even a bank account, and definitely no PayPal account, is potentially quite difficult. Money transfer? Except Western Union is also difficult to work with sometimes. Last time I called for identity verification, they seemed not to comprehend I was not in the United States, and I couldn't get it sent. Fees are brutal, too, at easily 20% for a small amount. So, potentially difficult enough, that even the headache of cryptocurrency starts to look attractive.
> I've been hearing the Western Union usurper argument since 2010. I doubt any of the people making those arguments actually use those services.
I know you weren’t talking about me but I’ve actually used western Union, and while it wasn’t bad, it wasn’t a particularly pleasant nor pain free experience either. Wise is EXCELLENT though.
More importantly, money exchangers and check caching places extract a TREMENDOUS toll on people who are forced to use them, and the prospect that could change is actually pretty good.
Up until now the main issue was the wastefulness and lack of scale/purpose fit of blockchain. It seems like ETH is poised to solve those things where BTC was stuck due to the interests of miners.
There are problems, but it really does feel like blockchain might have just finished it’s infancy (the scam era, let’s say).
Maybe I should publish something longer form on this. I had something written then chose to self censor
Either way, the table-stakes for digital and financial literacy in the modern world are rapidly changing, and we should be prepared for some increased level of baseline complexity in the coming decades.
I'd reword this as "I finally feel it has a solid use case", as the use case of "put western Union out of business for international same party money transfers" has been present since day one.
You're just now understanding that it takes time for complex software systems to mature and reach their goals. Next time a novel system appears, this reframing of your mentality might help you to see the benefits earlier on and become an early adopter.
This is true, that was badly worded. Maybe something like "the few use cases that make sense to me have finally become guilt-free".
> You're just now understanding that it takes time for complex software systems to mature and reach their goals. Next time a novel system appears, this reframing of your mentality might help you to see the benefits earlier on and become an early adopter.
But I still don't necessarily want to be an early adopter in every piece of technology. I'm perfectly content to let people find the sharp edges and report back -- and either way up until now it was an absolute no for me with the environmental impact (knowing that PoS was possible) and rampant low-grade scams.
But you've not sent money to yourself, you've sent Eth to yourself, and you still need a forex transaction on each end?
> Does this mean that we have a substrate for person to person hawala systems (which are normally outlawed by the government?)
I've thought of crypto as "hawala banking for geeks" for a while now, but if it's banned by the government then inserting extra steps does not fix that and if you become big enough they will come after you for money laundering.
Why do you want to trade shares via a blockchain rather than a perfectly normal broker?
True -- it cuts down on middle men though!
Also, there's the very very theoretical case of buying things in ETH/USDC/whatever else. While buying things in BTC and ETH may be a pipedream (I don't think so in the ETH case but I won't try to defend it), stable coins are quite alluring as essentially proto-FEDCoin.
There is no reason every nation won't have a coin, and they'll be traded that way. There are a lot of negative effects to more heavily digitizing the money system, but that's another discussion -- crypto is just serving as an emotionless, politics-free money transferer (of course, it is enveloped in politics still), with a different fee structure (vs. Western Union, for example).
I said this elsewhere but basically it gives us a chance to rebuild the money system. Even if what we build is bad it's not like we're being forced into it -- but if it's even a little better, the value is infinite (given infinite time).
> I've thought of crypto as "hawala banking for geeks" for a while now, but if it's banned by the government then inserting extra steps does not fix that and if you become big enough they will come after you for money laundering. > > Why do you want to trade shares via a blockchain rather than a perfectly normal broker?
I'm not sure the government will ever actually ban it at this point. Especially with the relatively "blessed" nature of USDC and size Coinbase has grown to (and it's market leader position). I think at this point bitcoin exists as a political tool and prepping mechanism for the complete digitization of currency. FedNOW is the first step in that direction, maybe we'll get FEDCoin later.
Brokers charge fees, and are protected by capital requirements and regulation (which also protects consumers of course!). I think a rebuild of the system gives us a chance to meaningfully improve on the system of legislation and regulation we have so far -- the second build of finance, let's say.
For example, it's unnecessarily hard to set up an ETF -- I think the middlemen, gatekeepers, and fees there could be reduced to near zero there.
1. https://ens.domains/
2. https://nftychat.xyz/ [0]
3. https://www.farcaster.xyz/
4. https://tryshowtime.xyz/
[0] I'm the co-founder
Monetary systems are so crucial to modern civilization that if you do set up a 'government-independent currency' then whoever has the most control over that monetary system themselves becomes a kind of de facto government. This is seen in historical studies of black-market currency systems, where things like a bottle of rum or a kilo of cocaine became effective measures of exchange (leading to the rise of organized crime in the USA in the 1920s, or the rise of drug cartels in Latin America from the 1970s onwards, which acted in reality as alternative government systems).
So, who controls bitcoin? This article points to whales and mining pools:
https://cryptobriefing.com/who-controls-bitcoin-guide-btc-st...
Money after all is a social phenomenon, and only has value because people agree it has value - although that is as true for $USD and gold as it is for bitcoin. This then raises the question of who controls those monetary systems (hint: the control system in all cases is not at all democratic in nature).
Probably the optimal global currency system (if you value stability) is the basket-of-currencies approach, in which the $USD loses its supremacy and monetary values are tied to the average values of the basket. This requires some understanding of how global central banking operates, and for that there's no better source than Nomi Prin's Collusion:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36204933-collusion
Return of the Special Drawing Right!
To me this blog reads like post-breakup copium. Dude just spent two years of his life and who knows how much money trying to find a market, only to realize there isn’t one. But he is sure someone else will find it! The technology is good!
No it isn’t. And no they won’t. Admit when you are wrong and serve as a lesson to others.
The real conundrum of cryptocurrency is that the technology is awesome, but the social implications of ripping the safety rails off the free market is so dire that only a disillusioned nerd could advocate for it.
did they? From my understanding availability of piracy was not really the issue behind the decline in revenue e.g. we still have all p2p infrastructure going on but the media revenue is through the roof - because of streaming.
Also to me it seemed more people used file serving service e.g. megaupload to download movies / music rather than torrents..
> and increasingly relevant in a world where protocol trumps products
does not seem to describe my experience at all. Most things that I and mainstream users tend to use are based on closed products rather than protocols... I hope the trend will disappear but it does not seem like it.
Who said that? Are we not allowed to talk about p2p without talking about crypto any more?
Deleted Comment
There are no alternative to a decentralized currency. Personally, I believe that the world would be a better place with a neutral/decentralized currency but I recognize that not everyone shares this opinion. I can't say that I "hate" fiat though, that seems a bit too strong.
This might continue even after pump and dump, but will no longer be lucrative.
(edit: see also "nerd sniping")
There is similarly no shortage of “architecture astronauts,” and whether the greed fuels the use of the wrong tool or vice versa — it probably doesn’t matter in the end.
Say it one more time for the people in the back!
A lot of us are still refining/discussing the same core concepts, cryptography, distributed systems, disbursement, consensus, just in different fields without the 'coin' component attached. A lot of this tech in crypto was nothing new (blockchain, proof of work, hashing, distributed databases), but the combination of them presented new and interesting hurdles to overcome. As time passed we saw new utility for these concepts to solve other interesting problems, but the entire time being a researcher in the cryptoasset space has felt like trying to be a 'serious engineer' while your cubicle is located in a casino floor. You can't make a commit or push a draft paper without it being a market-moving action, that is a social element that a lot of industry theory just doesn't have nailed down yet, and as engineers can be very stressful. Most of us just want to solve problems and build cool things, but its hard to create novel solutions at financial gunpoint.
Really? Sure, reading the whitepapers and playing with something new for a while has been fun, but "true engineers" will realize pretty soon that there's always a better tool for every. single. usecase.
This neatly encapsulates the often tragic distinction between ideology and real-world human behaviour.
You want a currency free of state intervention, you got it. That the majority of the market chose to leverage that for building casinos is the purest essence of that freedom.
Ideology-based financial systems that rely on actors 'doing the right thing', with no regulations to incentivize/coerce such behaviour, will usually fail to achieve its own stated objectives.
Just like how Skiff has being using other blockchain projects such as ENS domains as well as decentralized P2P software like IPFS to help build their product offering. [0]
Perhaps they found a use case for it.
[0] https://skiff.com
Oh, and about the cool, very decentral drive on IPFS thing: the drive is still only on a single server, pinned by a single server. That’s how IPFS works. It it would work otherwise and they didn’t have to actually pay their storage bills, they wouldn’t limit the storage to a mediocre 10GB less-than-gdrive shit tier.
there are plenty of services taking a cut from people trying to use this
multisender.app - pay/airdrop multiple people, thats it.
team.finance - broadcast to your community that you locked your tokens, instead of just saying so.
they solve a problem, they collect a cut from volume of transactions, they aren’t sitting in business development meetings around San Francisco because that’s reserved for grifters
so its easy to see how OP missed that
> Crypto speculation is a vast and fast-growing market, while other use cases are small.
Simply put, cryptocurrency has turned itself into a side-pot for disillusioned and desperate investors. The 'dream' that you're being sold is the same one we pondered 10 years ago - if we add enough bureaucracy, a democratically-controlled currency is feasible!
Time has proven this wrong. Every attempt at making the '15th competing standard' ends the same way. Nobody is putting their money in cryptocurrency, and arbitrary architectural rehashes like the Ethereum Merge isn't going to drive adoption.
The fact that blockchain is a super interesting accounting method is completely lost on the average consumer who just wants to buy food and pay bills. If crypto can't do this, it's not real currency.
And most of them intuitatively understand that making your own currency out of electrons probably won't work in the long run. Otherwise, work would become obsolete and the economy would grind to a halt.
And the speculation game is a lot like playing the lottery. Everyone can't win and if you aren't a loser yet it's only because you haven't been playing long enough.
This statement has validity but I don’t think it implies what you seem to think it does.
That the continual creation of new currencies is not a globally sustainable process does not mean we should not experiment with their creation. It also does not preclude a handful of them that support valid and important if not revolutionary use cases.
This is just an early phase.
Yeah, that's probably it.