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9. Currency.

• danielmg 8y ago
  has worked for literally millennia without it.
  • danablast2 8y ago
    traditional money can be readily stolen via taxation and inflation. Digital fiat can be frozen arbitrarily and is not private. So it has not worked.
  • bluejellybean 8y ago
    I dislike this reasoning, lots of things worked for millennia but that doesn't mean the modern version is somehow useless. Phone networks? Communication has worked for literally millennia without it.
  • lawn 8y ago
    Why did we ever move away from sea shells then?
    • seattle_spring 8y ago
      When I was young, taking the ferry would cost you a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. "Gimme five bees for a quarter," you'd say.
      • berbec 8y ago
        I'm cold and their are wolves after me.
• schoen 8y ago
  The article has a non-numbered use case for "Money" (and one for "Smart contracts") in which the author claims that blockchains are useful for these purposes. So the article is sort of "lite" blockchain skepticism: it focuses on the interfaces between blockchain-stored data and the real world, such as the oracle problem (how do we know that data that people store on a chain is accurate and that they haven't lied about it?), as well as the enforcement of blockchain-stored claims to physical assets.
  • berbec 8y ago
    I understand there is some theoretical use for blockchain as currency, but I have not really gotten good answers in regards to the current state of CryptoCurrency. Is crypto: money/currency (exchange for goods/services) a store of value (investment, hodl etc) a cool technology with no current useful application? If crypto is money, can I quickly, efficiently and without huge fees: Spend it at Amazon? My grocery store? My corner deli? Pay my rent? Pay my employees? Pay for dinner? If crypto is a store of value can I trust it will hold value in any sane, non-Venezuelan way, over any reasonable time period? If not, doesn't it default to a cool technology with no current useful application??
    • schoen 8y ago
      > If crypto is money, can I quickly, efficiently and without huge fees: Spend it at Amazon? My grocery store? My corner deli? Pay my rent? Pay my employees? Pay for dinner? I've seen people do all of these things, but in every case it depended on cryptocurrency hobbyists happening to be on the other side of the transaction, or on informal exchanges (and the trend may be that it's getting less common, not more). So it seems like the answer is "maybe, but not reliably and routinely". In this regard, cryptocurrencies might be more like commodities, collectibles, historic currencies, or foreign currencies (that are pretty much always still foreign, no matter where you travel). > If crypto is a store of value can I trust it will hold value in any sane, non-Venezuelan way, over any reasonable time period? Nope; in this regard, cryptocurrencies might be more like commodities or collectibles. "Not all plates go up in value; some go down." (National currencies can also be volatile, but most are dramatically more stable than cryptocurrencies.) You could try to hold a stablecoin, but it's not clear that the backer will be able to maintain the peg (or even that the backer itself believes that it can maintain the peg!). Futures traders might be able to force the issue unexpectedly. > If not, doesn't it default to a cool technology with no current useful application?? Most of the financial applications aren't currently routinely useful to most people. Although some people are optimistic that this is just a temporary bug or a matter of growing pains, I'm concerned that there are pretty strong scaling and sustainability problems with cryptocurrencies, so it might not be easy to fix this.