As far as I can tell, the only cryptocurrency that actually delivers on its name (i.e. being used as a currency) is Monero. Sure, it's all drugs and stolen credit cards, but it does undeniably solve a real world problem for its users instead of just being used as a vehicle for speculative investment.
With that said, I think if anyone comes up with a "killer-app" for crypto, then it'll be on the Ethereum chain. They seem to be the only ones who consistently work towards adding capabilities to the core technology.
Edit: I realize I haven't commented on the article at all. This sentence stood out to me:
> Today, we have all the tools we'll need, and indeed most of the tools we'll ever have, to build applications that are simultaneously cypherpunk and user-friendly. And so we should go out and do it.
Clearly, this is an important step. But the two examples he provides as a beacon of what's possible (Daimo and Farcaster) don't inspire a lot of enthusiasm. Daimo is just a decentralized version of Venmo and Farcaster is a protocol to build social networks on the blockchain, which is yet another tool and not an application.
I do still like reading Vitaliks thoughts. He's a pretty good writer, and it's evident that he spends a lot of time actually thinking about the topics he writes about.
>As far as I can tell, the only cryptocurrency that actually delivers on its name (i.e. being used as a currency) is Monero. Sure, it's all drugs and stolen credit cards, but it does undeniably solve a real world problem for its users instead of just being used as a vehicle for speculative investment.
This is exactly my use case (the former not later) with Monero and it's been amazing. Only marginally more difficult than to shop on amazon and feels a million times less sketchy than trying to find something locally. The speculative nature of crypto is therefore more of an annoyance as it causes the price to fluctuate too much between paying, shipping, and fund-release.
So you pay with monero but you still need to give them an address to ship to which some probably store somewhere where the police might eventually find it ?
I guess depending on the local police the chances of that leading to any trouble are lower than getting stabbed by a tweaker when you go out into the community to purchase your stuff
imo this is less of a technical issue and more of a regulatory one in 2024. Sending and receiving large amounts of btc/eth for instance might take a minute. For lower value point of sale transactions you don't really have to wait. And that's money in your pocket at that point not an IOU like a pending transaction at a US bank. Paying capital gains on transactions and constantly changing value dampens adoption quite a bit though
I'm really surprised sellers aren't trying to use it at all. There was a small push awhile ago ~2015/16 where a bunch of online stores started accepting bitcoin but IIRC they all stopped once the BTC/USD started to decrease.
I guess credit card fees are <4% so there might not be a big enough discount to offer consumers to make them figure out how to get crypto (without paying more than 4% fees somewhere). Perhaps a chargeback heavy industry such as porn or political groups could benefit from non-chargebackable transactions.
One of the things that made me less skeptical of Ethereum was that Vitalik has consistently argued based on his view of "Ether as digital oil to power the blockchain", which is to say that the point is not to just hodl, but to create a core technology that can enable different applications.
I still think that we should not forget the "I need a censorship-proof way to send money to someone overseas" story, but mostly as a hedge against the existing institutions, not as an immediate need.
The problem is that this gospel has been said for almost a decade now and despite, literally, billion dollars of assets that Vitalik has, and others flowing this is not happening.
Not saying that this could not happen as an hypotheses but cryptocurrency foundations are far far from business execution basic practices.
As an insider I can say that most money flows to a very small group of people and the governance is not really decentralized. For example, very few people can decide on Bitcoin and Ethereum protocol changes, and these people cannot be changed...
This has made you less skeptical of what he’s peddling? That slogan is a series of red flags in only eight words. He could be selling actual snake oil.
> As far as I can tell, the only cryptocurrency that actually delivers on its name (i.e. being used as a currency) is Monero.
In the last two weeks I've paid to people who cleaned my air conditioning, my girlfriend's nails, our lawyer, for delivery of some goods from US, for food delivery, for a sightseeing tour, and for exchange to local currency (delivered to my home) — all in USDT. I've also got USDT from a friend for booking Airbnb for him (he couldn't do it on his own account because of reasons). At this point, most of services in local community are advertised with payment in USDT first: via binance and bybit internal transfer, or just on trc-20.
Is running an app on ethereum still over 100x the cost to run it on, say, AWS?
I hear CEOs talk about how this will revolutionize the world, but realistically no one needs a cryptographically secure immutable ledger to validate that someone is the true owner of concert tickets or whatever.
I do wonder, if the only real-world application that needs a cryptographically secure immutable ledger, is cryptocurrency.
Farcaster is not a tool for building social applications. It is a social network with 70k+ DAU [1]
You can use it through multiple frontends, the officially developed one is Warpcast [2]
And lots of people pay for lots of things with bitcoin, today. It works fine, even if the confirmation takes 15-20 minutes and it costs five bucks. For some things where you prefer discretion, it's fine.
For privacy, just use a coinjoining wallet. It's a solved problem for a long time.
Commenters here are sour over bitcoin, for a variety of reasons, and ignorant at the same time.
Does moving funds between compartmentalized economies count as "currency" use? I know quite a few cases of using it to move money from Russia or China.
I think thats only a subset of people offshoring money. Many more who might have more means and therefore more pressure to offshore that means would probably opt to offshore that money by buying a vancouver condo they will never see.
They aren't. Zcash has opt-in privacy, which I think we've established doesn't work. By this logic BTC also has opt-in privacy – just use a mixer. Well, except that your BTC will be tainted if you do it, which effectively makes BTC non-fungible for all intents and purposes.
The only way to have a private, fungible cryptocurrency is to make privacy mandatory and not "something you enable because you are a drug dealer". Does this mean that everyone using Monero is automatically a drug dealer? Even if it does, it's waaay better to have consistency vs having a cryptocurrency partitioned into "normal coins" and "darknet market coins"
Hmm ... "proto-danksharding" which activated the "blobscriptions protocol" so that blobs are "much cheaper than calldata", all of this helping it to become an "L2-centric ecosystem". In the end, this leaves them "not confident enough in the complex code of an optimistic or SNARK-based EVM verifier".
I'm sold ... just tell me where to transfer the money.
There's actually interesting technology being developed here in the areas of distributed computation and zero trust systems. The implementations of Zero Knowledge Proofs and ongoing work on ZK-SNARKS I personally find most fascinating.
There's a lot more to this ecosystem than just speculation. At it's core is a distributed world computer but all anyone knows about is money.exe because this stuff is immensely complex.
If you look into the researcher rather than paying attention to the soyjack youtube thumbnails you'll find the actual substance. Nobody is going do the work for you. Or you know, just write it all off with a snide joke because "crypto bad".
The actual quote is "we are not *currently* at the point where we can be confident enough in the complex code of an optimistic or SNARK-based EVM verifier". The article seems to imply that "in the end", they will be.
Unlike the parent, the full quote gives me more confidence that they're being serious about the upgrades to the Ethereum protocol. This stuff is all cutting edge distribute systems and zero-knowledge proofs work, so of course it's going to take a while to reach confidence in how it'll work.
Something tells me that even if/when the optimistic or SNARK-based EVM verifier is production-ready, the person you're replying to will still feel somewhat unconvinced.
The only reason it's foreign to you is because you are not familiar with any of the technology. It's no different that having no idea about LLMs or ML or transformers etc., or if you are not a programmer than being confused by arrays and recursion and TCP/IP...
> Many have argued that the lack of large-scale applications for the past ten years proves that crypto is useless. I have always argued against this: pretty much every crypto application that is not financial speculation depends on low fees - and so while we have high fees, we should not be surprised that we mainly see financial speculation!
> Now that we have blobs, this key constraint that has been holding us back all this time is starting to melt away. Fees are finally much lower; my statement from seven years ago that the internet of money should not cost more than five cents per transaction is finally coming true.
---
All of this depends on so called "Layer 2s", which adds a great deal of UX complexity to the end user. I'm skeptical that this is best way to solve the scalability issues that plague cryptocurrency, but I will say that this looks to me like it has a much better shot of succeeding that anything Bitcoin has ever attempted to do on this front.
5 cents per transaction is high for many parts of the world, and exceptionally high if every interaction in normal life is turned into a financial transaction.
If their vision is "applications" it feels like any price is too high. Would you sign up for hn if it cost 5 cents? Even though that is nothing in terms of money (for most of us), the friction of money actually being involved in and of itself probably makes it not worth it. Especially when its just a silly internet thing.
Credit card users pay $1+ fees per transaction all the time. They don’t complain only because vendors usually eat the fees on their behalf to obscure the issue.
I have a “2% cash back on everything” card which I know is actually a “we charged your vendor 4% and shared half of that with people like you who clicked the right button” card. I don’t like it. But, that’s the game.
People complain about the impossibility of crypto having fees of pennies with settlement times of minutes while constantly using credit cards that have fees of dollars with a settlement time of days.
What parts of the world? In non developed countries bank fees are actually higher than in the West.
In Bosnia a most basic bank account costs about $3 per month, or 60 Ethereum transactions (most people usually have 10 - 20 transaction per month). For paying bills banks usually charge a commission fee of 1%. And if you want to send money to someone 50 kms away but across the border the fee is $20 with few days wait for money to be received.
>adds a great deal of UX complexity to the end user
Considering there are people who don't understand the bitcoins aren't INSIDE a physical wallet, that ship has sailed and made a revolution or two already.
In the many, many years they have spent building a pile of gibberish tech, traditional finance has begun transitioning to T-0 settlement on centralized platforms. FedNow is going to replace ACH and wires and allow 24/7 real-time transactions.
It hasn't at all. If you try to transfer money internationally, you will still pay huge fees and it will take sometimes days to settle. Crypto is truly international, and ERC20s like USDC remain fully programmable in a way that cash will never be. It makes things like permissionless 24/7 exchanges (see Uniswap) possible. Which is more than just point to point or account to account transfers. It's an exchange from one asset to another controlled completely by an automated market making algorithm. You cannot find that in trad fi.
> FedNow is going to allow 24/7 real-time transactions.
Following in the steps of what EU and UK did few years ago. (1)
And which always made this cryptocurrency fast settlement stuff sound laughable - like they're describing just what a regular bank account does, and it's supposedly their special magic, so what?
People need to look outside of the USA to understand the state of the art.
You can even find these systems in Africa already (2)
> Basically, Ethereum is no longer just a financial ecosystem. It's a full-stack replacement for large parts of "centralized tech", and even provides some things that centralized tech does not (eg. governance-related applications). And we need to build with this broader ecosystem in mind.
I have respect for ethereum. It seems like one of the few cryptocurrency projects actually trying to push those ideas as far as they'll go, instead of just being endless scams.
But still, at the end of the day, this feels like endless complexity and in the end we are just back we started: applications we could already do much better using traditional technologies.
What even is the elevator pitch use case of all this?
My (non-crypto) company uses USDC daily on L2 Arbitrum for international settlement, and have seen the fees drop to a few cents per transaction with the release of blobs. We have replaced the need for wires/TransferWise/Revolut on several of our routes.
There is absolutely no reason for USDC to be on a blockchain other than to interact with DeFi. Once DeFi hype dies USDC will be outcompeted by a centralized solution. It's multisig controlled anyway so it's the same thing.
The blockchain's security depends on native token value and the native token is a memecoin with no backing and if there's a speculative dump then the network has no security, so no not quite impossible.
To me, the pitch is take whatever you wanted to do with traditional technology and run a distributed lottery game for cash and prizes on top of it.
A database with a game show component for cash and prizes.
People want exactly this coupled with a bunch of hand waiving to obfuscate this reality so it has more emotional impact when you win the lottery. The traditional lottery is too obviously random with such poor odds. People want a more distributed lottery payout and crypto has delivered.
There is nothing wrong with this. No one pretends though that the state lottery is some mathematical investigation into the dynamics of a stochastic process. Playing the state lottery is not doing research in stochastic calculus. I suspect if the state lottery had started for the first time today though that is exactly how it would be marketed.
For businesses, doing the same thing for transactions between businesses that ERP systems did for internal transactions. Right now there's a lot of cumbersome and expensive mutual auditing, and nobody wants to put it all on a centralized third-party database because inevitably the third party will charge a lot of money once they're hard to replace.
Paul Brody is head of the Ethereum effort at EY, and wrote a book about this called Ethereum for Business. He includes a lot of specific examples. As Vitalik mentioned in the article, most of it is waiting for scaling.
It looks like not a single HN reader is using blockchain technology for anything.
If nobody is using blockchain technology outside of blockchain projects, what are the reasons we expect that some day we will? What could be a near term use case?
Its main purpose is internet currency. The only serious uses surround that via smart contracts, like decentralized exchanges or provably fair gambling (unsavory as that is). Any time someone says "the currency aspect is separate from blockchain," I'd be wary, seeing how the entire point of blockchain is decentralization via proof of work or stake.
NFTs can make sense in theory as an alternative to the already-popular video game collectibles, as silly as that premise is, but they never really got traction, and again that's related to currency. There's been a lot of vaporware around things like corporate blockchains to track assets, which don't even make sense in theory.
NFTs make absolutely no sense for video games collectables. As it is, video game collectables work just fine, NFTs add nothing except cost and complexity.
If anything will get us out of this ad-ridden hellhole of the centralized internet, I think it'll be cryptocurrency that allows users to transfer tiny amounts of money to a site instead of an ad platform paying the site fractions of a cent for my view.
Like if all I need to do is transfer $0.00001 to the site for my view and it's guaranteed to be free from ads or data hoarding, sign me tf up.
Once you set that up as crypto, thats it, thats the price. With the present model ad agencies can play all sorts of games with this price, inflating or deflating it to suit immediate business needs. Its a whole meta that will poof into smoke. So unless the new crypto meta captures the benefits to ad agencies the current “estimate” model of pricing has, it won’t see daylight.
I think it could be used for some kind of permissioned, collectively crowdsourced database that's (mostly) free from the control of a single group of administrators/gatekeepers. I guess kind of like a decentralized wiki.
In my view, blockchains shine where you need auditable global state, bonus points if you don't want central control in your operations (obviously this then kicks the can to the core devs). This use-case is fairly miniscule for most applications, though.
As far as currency, I think they also have their use-cases as well but most people don't want a global audit trail of all their purchases. Things like Monero and Zcash shine here. The value fluctuations are obnoxious, though.
I'm saying this as a big blockchain skeptic. I think most of the things people use them for are silly.
My non-techie brother has been staking his 1 ETH he bought couple of years ago and has earned today, in his words, “slightly more than from my insurance savings account in the past 10 years”. I think that’s a really nice use case.
I have personally used cryptocurrency (Monero) to buy small quantities of substances for personal use from darkweb marketplaces a while ago.
This has been a great experience, I think the system of public vendor reputation , reviews, user discussions, independently published test results etc. adds a significant layer of safety to this process compared to random local 'street' type transactions of this sort.
Whether you approve of this or not, crypto is a very important layer in this system, I feel like this is the only actual use it has currently, although it's obviously not something crypto advocates like to advertise.
Some days ago ICP showed it can run ML on a blockchain.
While this is nice and does show that distributed computing is a real possibility I also don't think that anyone is going to switch from Amazon/Azure to ICP any time soon.
But I must say the idea is really nice. It's very easy to develop Actor model based software and deploy it on ICP.
I would actually love it if you had a link with more info on that. Don't take this the wrong way, but my first guess would be that that basically isn't true; either it's not actually machine learning (as is understood today) or it isn't actually a blockchain but rather normal distributed computing being "verified" via blockchain somehow?
a better question is to look at how people use it, the frictions they encounter, and who works on solving those frictions
just saying “speculation” as if thats not a use case misses that “financial services” are our biggest industry on the planet and thats mirrored in the blockchain space, many people solve frictions and compete with each other. it willfully ignores that all currencies are 99% held as stores of value and the M0 money supply is a tiny fraction used as cash and for merchant transactions, a distribution also mirrored in the blockchain space but ignorantly used to discredit it despite ironically showing how well it works as a parallel economy.
additionally due to the structure of blockchains as a pay to write database, most use cases that aren't related to stores of value or trading are intrinsically tied to something financial which makes the standard impossible
Given that we are now entering another crypto hype cycle and blockchain technology, discussions often veer towards crypto and the allure of embedded tokens. I’m going to stick to the realty and opportunity: utilizing blockchain in fixed income finance.
Having spent two decades navigating the complexities of Wall Street, I know the critical problem plaguing the fixed income market: the overwhelming amount of data generated during the origination of debt instruments and the subsequent challenges in reconciliation during clearing and settlement. Night cycles, calling Bloomberg to fix security master. Calling DTCC to settle trades. Blockchain is the best technology to solve this. Only if applied correctly. Otherwise, it’s a waste.
We started with a fundamental goal: to debunk the myths and misconceptions surrounding blockchain in the securities space. Despite the pervasive FUD propagated by the media, we have now proved to regulators that securities originated on blockchain are indeed securities – not merely speculative digital assets.
At its core, we are looking to address the root cause of friction in fixed income trading: the lack of direct origination and data quality across market participants. By leveraging a permissioned network, we have proved by recording of municipal loans and securities on our blockchain. While it may not be the flashy product that garners headlines, this milestone marks a significant step forward. We also trained all of FINRA’s fixed income examiners….
Our next step is to bring brokered CDs, directly to the investors, giving them access to negotiate with the issuers. From there the goal is to extend to real-time clearing and settlement, streamlining processes and enhancing efficiency across the fixed income ecosystem.
>just saying “speculation” as if thats not a use case misses that “financial services” are our biggest industry on the planet and thats mirrored in the blockchain space
This is such a great comparison! Crypto and "financial services" are both a massive waste of labor that produces zero material wealth and mainly exist to facilitate money laundering and further upward siphoning of wealth.
This is why Janet Yellen is currently throwing a tantrum that those big meanies in China aren't playing fair by using their labor to actually manufacture things instead of shuffle fake money back and forth between different buckets until more money appears out of thin air: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/yellen-intends-warn-...
People love shitting on NFTs, but there's still a really good art scene based on NFTs and smart contracts. And once you have digital objects that you actually care about, all the web3 infrastructure is surprisingly useful.
> It looks like not a single HN reader is using blockchain technology for anything.
> If nobody is using blockchain technology outside of blockchain projects
HN is very adverse to the blockchain space. This is not the best place to look for people using the technology since 9/10 times you would get downvoted to oblivion
7. The blockchain is now at a stage in its development equivalent to where
the internet was in or around 1995. The internet was unstoppable in 1995
and blockchain technology is unstoppable now. It will become ubiquitous
in all major industrial and financial sectors, simply because it allows for the
immutable recording of data, thereby reducing friction in commercial and
consumer transactions and obliterating the scope for dispute as to what
has occurred.
8. As the Master of the Rolls and Head of Civil Justice in England and Wales,
I hold an office that pre-dates modern trade in derivatives and
reinsurance, even steam engines, powered flight, and certainly the
internet. I am particularly and obviously concerned about the reputation
and development of English law and the jurisdiction of England and Wales.
9. Many people do not realise that English law governs trading in €600 trillion
of OTC derivatives annually, in €11.6 trillion in metals trading, in £250
billion in M&A deals, and in £80 billion in insurance contracts every year –
just to take a few examples. My hope is that English law will prove to be
the law of choice for borderless blockchain technology as its take up grows
exponentially in the months and years to come.
I still don’t understand what a fully realized crypto ecosystem would allow people to do that isn’t already being done well by standard technology. Like it or not, for most people doing most things, the government or large companies are suitable enough of a store of trust which is the problem crypto solves by being decentralized. I think it’s a neat technology for tech people but I still struggle to see why normal people doing most things would want to pay for things with bitcoin.
1) governments didn’t get to print money at will until they went off the gold standard, and the financial regime we have now is worse than the gold era. (Highly dubious, I don’t buy this entirely)
2) blockchain done right gives hub-and-spoke efficiency without creating hegemons like VISA, SWIFT and PayPal to boss around their users with impunity.
For anyone interested in in-depth details of Ethereum protocol and upgrades, checkout the Protocol Study Group. Yesterday's presentation was about scaling and Danksharding, given by its creator https://epf.wiki/
Readit News
With that said, I think if anyone comes up with a "killer-app" for crypto, then it'll be on the Ethereum chain. They seem to be the only ones who consistently work towards adding capabilities to the core technology.
Edit: I realize I haven't commented on the article at all. This sentence stood out to me:
> Today, we have all the tools we'll need, and indeed most of the tools we'll ever have, to build applications that are simultaneously cypherpunk and user-friendly. And so we should go out and do it.
Clearly, this is an important step. But the two examples he provides as a beacon of what's possible (Daimo and Farcaster) don't inspire a lot of enthusiasm. Daimo is just a decentralized version of Venmo and Farcaster is a protocol to build social networks on the blockchain, which is yet another tool and not an application.
I do still like reading Vitaliks thoughts. He's a pretty good writer, and it's evident that he spends a lot of time actually thinking about the topics he writes about.
This is exactly my use case (the former not later) with Monero and it's been amazing. Only marginally more difficult than to shop on amazon and feels a million times less sketchy than trying to find something locally. The speculative nature of crypto is therefore more of an annoyance as it causes the price to fluctuate too much between paying, shipping, and fund-release.
I guess credit card fees are <4% so there might not be a big enough discount to offer consumers to make them figure out how to get crypto (without paying more than 4% fees somewhere). Perhaps a chargeback heavy industry such as porn or political groups could benefit from non-chargebackable transactions.
I still think that we should not forget the "I need a censorship-proof way to send money to someone overseas" story, but mostly as a hedge against the existing institutions, not as an immediate need.
Not saying that this could not happen as an hypotheses but cryptocurrency foundations are far far from business execution basic practices.
As an insider I can say that most money flows to a very small group of people and the governance is not really decentralized. For example, very few people can decide on Bitcoin and Ethereum protocol changes, and these people cannot be changed...
This has made you less skeptical of what he’s peddling? That slogan is a series of red flags in only eight words. He could be selling actual snake oil.
This is has been said about every coin since the beginning of crypto.
In the last two weeks I've paid to people who cleaned my air conditioning, my girlfriend's nails, our lawyer, for delivery of some goods from US, for food delivery, for a sightseeing tour, and for exchange to local currency (delivered to my home) — all in USDT. I've also got USDT from a friend for booking Airbnb for him (he couldn't do it on his own account because of reasons). At this point, most of services in local community are advertised with payment in USDT first: via binance and bybit internal transfer, or just on trc-20.
I hear CEOs talk about how this will revolutionize the world, but realistically no one needs a cryptographically secure immutable ledger to validate that someone is the true owner of concert tickets or whatever.
I do wonder, if the only real-world application that needs a cryptographically secure immutable ledger, is cryptocurrency.
[1] https://twitter.com/dwr/status/1774490997789241709 [2] https://www.farcaster.xyz/
I know it’s hard to imagine for the west but places exist where working around the local financial system is a huge benefit.
For privacy, just use a coinjoining wallet. It's a solved problem for a long time.
Commenters here are sour over bitcoin, for a variety of reasons, and ignorant at the same time.
The only way to have a private, fungible cryptocurrency is to make privacy mandatory and not "something you enable because you are a drug dealer". Does this mean that everyone using Monero is automatically a drug dealer? Even if it does, it's waaay better to have consistency vs having a cryptocurrency partitioned into "normal coins" and "darknet market coins"
I'm sold ... just tell me where to transfer the money.
There's a lot more to this ecosystem than just speculation. At it's core is a distributed world computer but all anyone knows about is money.exe because this stuff is immensely complex.
If you look into the researcher rather than paying attention to the soyjack youtube thumbnails you'll find the actual substance. Nobody is going do the work for you. Or you know, just write it all off with a snide joke because "crypto bad".
Dead Comment
> Many have argued that the lack of large-scale applications for the past ten years proves that crypto is useless. I have always argued against this: pretty much every crypto application that is not financial speculation depends on low fees - and so while we have high fees, we should not be surprised that we mainly see financial speculation!
> Now that we have blobs, this key constraint that has been holding us back all this time is starting to melt away. Fees are finally much lower; my statement from seven years ago that the internet of money should not cost more than five cents per transaction is finally coming true.
---
All of this depends on so called "Layer 2s", which adds a great deal of UX complexity to the end user. I'm skeptical that this is best way to solve the scalability issues that plague cryptocurrency, but I will say that this looks to me like it has a much better shot of succeeding that anything Bitcoin has ever attempted to do on this front.
Credit card users pay $1+ fees per transaction all the time. They don’t complain only because vendors usually eat the fees on their behalf to obscure the issue.
I have a “2% cash back on everything” card which I know is actually a “we charged your vendor 4% and shared half of that with people like you who clicked the right button” card. I don’t like it. But, that’s the game.
People complain about the impossibility of crypto having fees of pennies with settlement times of minutes while constantly using credit cards that have fees of dollars with a settlement time of days.
In Bosnia a most basic bank account costs about $3 per month, or 60 Ethereum transactions (most people usually have 10 - 20 transaction per month). For paying bills banks usually charge a commission fee of 1%. And if you want to send money to someone 50 kms away but across the border the fee is $20 with few days wait for money to be received.
Deleted Comment
Not exactly, L2s are being abstracted away, end users eventually wont even be aware what chain they are interacting with without tracing the tx
Considering there are people who don't understand the bitcoins aren't INSIDE a physical wallet, that ship has sailed and made a revolution or two already.
There are some wallets that make this a pain (Metamask) but newer wallets like Rabby (https://rabby.io) and Rainbow are huge improvements.
Following in the steps of what EU and UK did few years ago. (1)
And which always made this cryptocurrency fast settlement stuff sound laughable - like they're describing just what a regular bank account does, and it's supposedly their special magic, so what?
People need to look outside of the USA to understand the state of the art.
You can even find these systems in Africa already (2)
1) https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/instant_pa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments
2) https://www.mfw4a.org/news/instant-payment-transactions-afri...
I have respect for ethereum. It seems like one of the few cryptocurrency projects actually trying to push those ideas as far as they'll go, instead of just being endless scams.
But still, at the end of the day, this feels like endless complexity and in the end we are just back we started: applications we could already do much better using traditional technologies.
What even is the elevator pitch use case of all this?
And of those remaining the overwhelming majority deserve it.
So you're trying to convince people to adopt Etheruem, Blockchain etc to solve a problem no one has.
> It's a full-stack replacement for large parts of "centralized tech"
Anti-censorship, permissionless data that lasts longer than centralized companies..?
A database with a game show component for cash and prizes.
People want exactly this coupled with a bunch of hand waiving to obfuscate this reality so it has more emotional impact when you win the lottery. The traditional lottery is too obviously random with such poor odds. People want a more distributed lottery payout and crypto has delivered.
There is nothing wrong with this. No one pretends though that the state lottery is some mathematical investigation into the dynamics of a stochastic process. Playing the state lottery is not doing research in stochastic calculus. I suspect if the state lottery had started for the first time today though that is exactly how it would be marketed.
Paul Brody is head of the Ethereum effort at EY, and wrote a book about this called Ethereum for Business. He includes a lot of specific examples. As Vitalik mentioned in the article, most of it is waiting for scaling.
I asked this in an Ask HN today, but got no answer so far:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39852389
It looks like not a single HN reader is using blockchain technology for anything.
If nobody is using blockchain technology outside of blockchain projects, what are the reasons we expect that some day we will? What could be a near term use case?
NFTs can make sense in theory as an alternative to the already-popular video game collectibles, as silly as that premise is, but they never really got traction, and again that's related to currency. There's been a lot of vaporware around things like corporate blockchains to track assets, which don't even make sense in theory.
So many ideas are infeasible right now because CC fees are high, and making any payment is extremely high friction.
I don't know anyone who paid anything with it in the last 12 months.
Like if all I need to do is transfer $0.00001 to the site for my view and it's guaranteed to be free from ads or data hoarding, sign me tf up.
In my view, blockchains shine where you need auditable global state, bonus points if you don't want central control in your operations (obviously this then kicks the can to the core devs). This use-case is fairly miniscule for most applications, though.
As far as currency, I think they also have their use-cases as well but most people don't want a global audit trail of all their purchases. Things like Monero and Zcash shine here. The value fluctuations are obnoxious, though.
I'm saying this as a big blockchain skeptic. I think most of the things people use them for are silly.
I have personally used cryptocurrency (Monero) to buy small quantities of substances for personal use from darkweb marketplaces a while ago.
This has been a great experience, I think the system of public vendor reputation , reviews, user discussions, independently published test results etc. adds a significant layer of safety to this process compared to random local 'street' type transactions of this sort.
Whether you approve of this or not, crypto is a very important layer in this system, I feel like this is the only actual use it has currently, although it's obviously not something crypto advocates like to advertise.
While this is nice and does show that distributed computing is a real possibility I also don't think that anyone is going to switch from Amazon/Azure to ICP any time soon.
But I must say the idea is really nice. It's very easy to develop Actor model based software and deploy it on ICP.
I would actually love it if you had a link with more info on that. Don't take this the wrong way, but my first guess would be that that basically isn't true; either it's not actually machine learning (as is understood today) or it isn't actually a blockchain but rather normal distributed computing being "verified" via blockchain somehow?
Would love to be proven wrong though.
just saying “speculation” as if thats not a use case misses that “financial services” are our biggest industry on the planet and thats mirrored in the blockchain space, many people solve frictions and compete with each other. it willfully ignores that all currencies are 99% held as stores of value and the M0 money supply is a tiny fraction used as cash and for merchant transactions, a distribution also mirrored in the blockchain space but ignorantly used to discredit it despite ironically showing how well it works as a parallel economy.
additionally due to the structure of blockchains as a pay to write database, most use cases that aren't related to stores of value or trading are intrinsically tied to something financial which makes the standard impossible
Having spent two decades navigating the complexities of Wall Street, I know the critical problem plaguing the fixed income market: the overwhelming amount of data generated during the origination of debt instruments and the subsequent challenges in reconciliation during clearing and settlement. Night cycles, calling Bloomberg to fix security master. Calling DTCC to settle trades. Blockchain is the best technology to solve this. Only if applied correctly. Otherwise, it’s a waste.
We started with a fundamental goal: to debunk the myths and misconceptions surrounding blockchain in the securities space. Despite the pervasive FUD propagated by the media, we have now proved to regulators that securities originated on blockchain are indeed securities – not merely speculative digital assets.
At its core, we are looking to address the root cause of friction in fixed income trading: the lack of direct origination and data quality across market participants. By leveraging a permissioned network, we have proved by recording of municipal loans and securities on our blockchain. While it may not be the flashy product that garners headlines, this milestone marks a significant step forward. We also trained all of FINRA’s fixed income examiners….
Our next step is to bring brokered CDs, directly to the investors, giving them access to negotiate with the issuers. From there the goal is to extend to real-time clearing and settlement, streamlining processes and enhancing efficiency across the fixed income ecosystem.
Here's how a trade moves through our system in current state…it’s a mental journey. https://www.chicagofed.org/markets/view-lasalle-street/us-re...
This is such a great comparison! Crypto and "financial services" are both a massive waste of labor that produces zero material wealth and mainly exist to facilitate money laundering and further upward siphoning of wealth.
This is why Janet Yellen is currently throwing a tantrum that those big meanies in China aren't playing fair by using their labor to actually manufacture things instead of shuffle fake money back and forth between different buckets until more money appears out of thin air: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/yellen-intends-warn-...
Is that a "good art" scene, or a "good" art scene?
I'm still not quite getting the idea here—these assets only really "exist" in web3 apps, right?
Banks don’t want to deal with treasury departments nor do the banks want to be beholden to federal governments regarding prime rates.
Ethereum allows banks to circumvent these types of issues because rates are dictated by banks not by governments and their treasury departments.
Crypto currency is coming soon. It’s only a matter of time and validating processes now.
Isn't "debt" a contract between the bank and a user? How do you transfer that and to whom?
And at the same time it's not battle tested. Any CFO who signs of on something like that risks shareholder fury when anything goes wrong.
> If nobody is using blockchain technology outside of blockchain projects
HN is very adverse to the blockchain space. This is not the best place to look for people using the technology since 9/10 times you would get downvoted to oblivion
What people like you usually miss.. hodling bitcoin IS one of its uses, store of value.
> It looks like not a single HN reader is using blockchain technology for anything.
You haven't missed anything, that's why we say bitcoin, not blockchain.
https://securitize.io/learn/press/blackrock-launches-first-t...
Ransomware, evading currency controls, funding North Korea.
8. As the Master of the Rolls and Head of Civil Justice in England and Wales, I hold an office that pre-dates modern trade in derivatives and reinsurance, even steam engines, powered flight, and certainly the internet. I am particularly and obviously concerned about the reputation and development of English law and the jurisdiction of England and Wales. 9. Many people do not realise that English law governs trading in €600 trillion of OTC derivatives annually, in €11.6 trillion in metals trading, in £250 billion in M&A deals, and in £80 billion in insurance contracts every year – just to take a few examples. My hope is that English law will prove to be the law of choice for borderless blockchain technology as its take up grows exponentially in the months and years to come.
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Speech-M...
Case closed.
1) governments didn’t get to print money at will until they went off the gold standard, and the financial regime we have now is worse than the gold era. (Highly dubious, I don’t buy this entirely)
2) blockchain done right gives hub-and-spoke efficiency without creating hegemons like VISA, SWIFT and PayPal to boss around their users with impunity.
This I believe entirely.
Not sure if that's possible or if it violates any HN policies about how links are displayed, apologies if it's a silly/useless suggestion.
Edit: Not sure how popularis eth.limo w.r.t. to HN submissions, but the full domain should probably be displayed for any eth.limo submission.