> As a young person in the United States, the main concern is that if you aren't one of the greatest at what you do, you'll be doomed to a life of increasing poverty

In psychology there’s a concept called splitting, or dichotomous thinking, where a person only thinks of things in concepts of their extremes. Either the most extreme good outcome, or the most extreme bad outcome. They might see people or public figures as either amazing or evil. The Wikipedia page has a primer on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology) But you don’t need a Wikipedia article or psychology concepts to realize that there are more outcomes than extreme success or increasing poverty.

I’m fascinated by how these concepts that were once relegated to psychology and therapy have started to become commonplace among young people on the internet. They’re not seen as failure modes in thinking, but rather an obvious conclusion from whatever they’ve been consuming so much of online.

The comment above is a prime example. Even the obsession over “food derived from vegetable oils and chemically bleached wheat” is a confusing conclusion for me, someone who has had no problem avoiding wheat products and eating healthy on a budget with even minimal effort. The food topic is particularly strange because it’s not that hard to learn basic cooking skills, buy cheap vegetable, and cook quick and easy meals. Yet I continue talking to young people who simultaneously fret about food quality while filling their diets with nothing but processed and fast foods, many of which are more expensive than cooking basic fast meals.

I don’t know what else to say, other than the above style of thinking is, in my experience, indicative of what happens when someone collects too much perspective from the internet and not enough from the real world. Given the context of this comment section, I can only recommend trying to reevaluate, disconnect from the internet a little more, and make an effort to reconnect with the real world

Can someone give me a good use case (even better if you're doing it yourself) for a smart contract?

What is anyone doing with them that they find really handy?

I've never been able to understand how it gets used / why you would use smart contracts. I've googled and read... still don't grok it.

I've seen so many "benefits" listed, but none make sense to me as far as the process you go through and how it works out in the end. Often it's described as a magic thing that eliminates the use of "intermediaries" and so on. I suppose that is true but you only get to that by going through all the complexity of from making sure someone writes a good contract / getting folks from the outside to review and validate it and so on. I'm not sure that saved a lot in the end.

Much like a most things blockchain I find these ideas (not bad ones) and then the practical usage ... much less than ideal.

One brick at a time has been my philosophy for a while and it's worked well. Making a bucket list of life, then turning that into to do lists, then doing the things 1 by 1.

- Travel around the world solo for years

- Find a wife, get married & have kids

- Build my dream website (https://dustinbrett.com/)

- Get a job in Big Tech as a self taught developer

It's been 10 years since I started living this way and it's worked out so far. Before living this way I had no real plans, just hopes.

Well looks like my timing is off.

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 obvious use-case for owning your own money

Definitely! But on a blockchain you don't own your money, the consensus does. The Ethereum split proved this.

>>how does a decentralized coin implement KYC for a wallet-to-wallet transfer like you mention?

>the KYC comes during off ramps back to the fiat system

And here we have your answer. It doesn't. In fact using your own logic, I could argue Tornado Cash is KYC'd 'because at offramp' which of course is absurd.

Now that you've made it crystal clear your use case does not include dai implementing KYC, I return to my thesis: DAI is imminently dead by .gov pulling a Tornado Cash on all the underlying centralized collateral locked up in DAI.

Coming from UX and game design, so many app designers try to "gamify" things like running, lifting, and cleaning.

Adding gamification adds a short-lived hedonic happiness hit that doesn't last very long. Sometimes we'll see articles about "making apps delightful" by adding a shiny button to an app that looks great when you hit "task complete". By the 100th time you click that button, that hit will have worn off.

Gamification works as a crutch at best. Instead, designers should really aim for the "eudaimonic" side of the task. E.g. your room is now clean. Or a workout app could help users better keep track of their strength / ability to lift heavier / better form over time, and reflect on their improvements. These will make users feel a lot more gratification.

how does a decentralized coin implement KYC for a wallet-to-wallet transfer like you mention?