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>someone else will come up with a cryptocurrency that's actually useful You named 8 different digital coins. Why aren’t any of them useful? Why do we need othe

by wil421 7y ago

>someone else will come up with a cryptocurrency that's actually useful You named 8 different digital coins. Why aren’t any of them useful? Why do we need other ones?

nostrademons 7y ago
It's like any other startup: building a product that's useful enough to get widespread adoption requires nailing a lot of different details. You leave one critical feature off and you don't get adoption. You get all of them right and the product takes off on a hypergrowth curve. It's like how Reddit took off once they added comments, or AirBnB took off once they started taking professional-quality photos. It's not that comments define Reddit (a Reddit with comments but no links or upvoting is a mailing list) or that photos define AirBnB (an AirBnB with photos but no booking, billing, or review systems is a travel blog), but that those were the last critical features needed for success. Speaking of the platform coins (Ethereum, EOS, Tron), I can think of few critical features they're missing. Scalability is one of them, which Ethereum is working on and EOS has - the network has to support more than 10 TPS. The ability to host a pretty, intuitive UI on the blockchain itself (so that you don't also need to run a website that listens to blockchain events for average users to run your DApp) is another. Discoverability is another, letting ordinary users find useful apps and spread them around.
- anchpop 7y ago
  Do you view privacy as an important quality? Nano seems like a pretty good attempt at making a cryptocurrency that's useful as a currency, but transactions are not private and I'm not sure how big of a problem that is
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    I don't personally, but there are cryptocurrencies that have made some really big strides there: Monero and ZCash. I've heard that a lot of dark-web business is actually switching over from Bitcoin to Monero, so it's getting some real adoption. One of the interesting things about the cryptocurrency space is that it's challenging one of our fundamental assumptions about economics, namely that currency is a winner-take-all market and everything works better if there's a single currency used for everything. Instead we're seeing that currencies can actually have different properties, and that this can actually affect which currency you'd chose to use in which circumstance. Want to do things that you don't want the government to know about? Use a privacy coin like ZCash or Monero. Want to let your computer programs transact economically? Use a platform coin like Ethereum, EOS, or Tron, and select which based on whether you want to write your smart contracts in Solidity, WebAssembly, or Java, respectively. Want to define a marketplace and create a utility coin to mediate transactions in it? That's what coins like BAT (Brave), Kin (Kik) and now Libra (Facebook) do. The primary functions of a currency (store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account) are also now getting unbundled: Bitcoin is used as a store of value, but not as a medium of exchange, while something like Monero or BAT is much more a medium of exchange than a store of value, and stablecoins like Tether or USDC are filling the unit-of-account role. That trend has been going on for decades - stocks and bonds are stores of value, but not mediums of exchanges or units of account, while in-game currencies are units of accounts but not a good store of value or unit of exchange - but the crypto space has made it explicitly clear.
    - samstave 7y ago
      What are the primary dark-web businesses? * porn? * child porn? * drugs? What else?
      - nostrademons 7y ago
        It's not exactly a corner of the web I frequent, so your guess is as good as mine. The ones I've heard of include drugs, armaments, zero-day security exploits, data breaches, and identity theft. Child porn and human trafficking are probably on there somewhere too. Porn (between consenting adults) isn't a dark-web industry, at least in the West: you can put a credit card into any number of adult businesses online and get your fill of any sexual fetish imaginable without breaking any laws.
- wil421 7y ago
  Thank you for the comments.
- ironic_comment 7y ago
  The blockchain has revolutionized the way people talk about... the blockchain.
buboard 7y ago
We are not going to need any of them until we do. People just don't adopt them because wallets are still difficult to use, , they are a nightmare tax-wise and because most banks fear/hate them. But in a world beyond those obstacles, many of them will be useful for different reasons. Some will be safer as long term value stores , others will be fast enough for microtransactions. Considering that exchanging between them is trivial and instant, i think there will be many of them circulating in parallel

by wil421 7y ago

>someone else will come up with a cryptocurrency that's actually useful You named 8 different digital coins. Why aren’t any of them useful? Why do we need other ones?

nostrademons 7y ago

It's like any other startup: building a product that's useful enough to get widespread adoption requires nailing a lot of different details. You leave one critical feature off and you don't get adoption. You get all of them right and the product takes off on a hypergrowth curve. It's like how Reddit took off once they added comments, or AirBnB took off once they started taking professional-quality photos. It's not that comments define Reddit (a Reddit with comments but no links or upvoting is a mailing list) or that photos define AirBnB (an AirBnB with photos but no booking, billing, or review systems is a travel blog), but that those were the last critical features needed for success. Speaking of the platform coins (Ethereum, EOS, Tron), I can think of few critical features they're missing. Scalability is one of them, which Ethereum is working on and EOS has - the network has to support more than 10 TPS. The ability to host a pretty, intuitive UI on the blockchain itself (so that you don't also need to run a website that listens to blockchain events for average users to run your DApp) is another. Discoverability is another, letting ordinary users find useful apps and spread them around.

anchpop 7y ago
Do you view privacy as an important quality? Nano seems like a pretty good attempt at making a cryptocurrency that's useful as a currency, but transactions are not private and I'm not sure how big of a problem that is
- nostrademons 7y ago
  I don't personally, but there are cryptocurrencies that have made some really big strides there: Monero and ZCash. I've heard that a lot of dark-web business is actually switching over from Bitcoin to Monero, so it's getting some real adoption. One of the interesting things about the cryptocurrency space is that it's challenging one of our fundamental assumptions about economics, namely that currency is a winner-take-all market and everything works better if there's a single currency used for everything. Instead we're seeing that currencies can actually have different properties, and that this can actually affect which currency you'd chose to use in which circumstance. Want to do things that you don't want the government to know about? Use a privacy coin like ZCash or Monero. Want to let your computer programs transact economically? Use a platform coin like Ethereum, EOS, or Tron, and select which based on whether you want to write your smart contracts in Solidity, WebAssembly, or Java, respectively. Want to define a marketplace and create a utility coin to mediate transactions in it? That's what coins like BAT (Brave), Kin (Kik) and now Libra (Facebook) do. The primary functions of a currency (store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account) are also now getting unbundled: Bitcoin is used as a store of value, but not as a medium of exchange, while something like Monero or BAT is much more a medium of exchange than a store of value, and stablecoins like Tether or USDC are filling the unit-of-account role. That trend has been going on for decades - stocks and bonds are stores of value, but not mediums of exchanges or units of account, while in-game currencies are units of accounts but not a good store of value or unit of exchange - but the crypto space has made it explicitly clear.
  - samstave 7y ago
    What are the primary dark-web businesses? * porn? * child porn? * drugs? What else?
    - nostrademons 7y ago
      It's not exactly a corner of the web I frequent, so your guess is as good as mine. The ones I've heard of include drugs, armaments, zero-day security exploits, data breaches, and identity theft. Child porn and human trafficking are probably on there somewhere too. Porn (between consenting adults) isn't a dark-web industry, at least in the West: you can put a credit card into any number of adult businesses online and get your fill of any sexual fetish imaginable without breaking any laws.
wil421 7y ago
Thank you for the comments.
ironic_comment 7y ago
The blockchain has revolutionized the way people talk about... the blockchain.

buboard 7y ago

We are not going to need any of them until we do. People just don't adopt them because wallets are still difficult to use, , they are a nightmare tax-wise and because most banks fear/hate them. But in a world beyond those obstacles, many of them will be useful for different reasons. Some will be safer as long term value stores , others will be fast enough for microtransactions. Considering that exchanging between them is trivial and instant, i think there will be many of them circulating in parallel