6 ms·

Has anyone actually found a use for cryptocurrency and/or the blockchain yet that is not "burn a shit-ton of power on arguing over units of cryptocurrency are w

Has anyone actually found a use for cryptocurrency and/or the blockchain yet that is not "burn a shit-ton of power on arguing over units of cryptocurrency are worth anything"?

yellow_postit 6y ago
Rediscovering why some financial regulation makes sense come to mind. A petri dish for relearning.
thebean11 6y ago
Transferring money across borders, gambling, buying drugs are the main three that come to mind. edit: missed financial speculation
- dudus 6y ago
  I was going to say drugs, ransom, money laundering and other illegal activities are the main use cases for crypto
  - seibelj 6y ago
    They also all happened before crypto. But no one spoke about the evils of fiat currency then.
    - raziel2701 6y ago
      What do I, a regular Joe not interested in buying illegal things, gain from using bitcoin? What's the proposition? Where's the value?
      - seibelj 6y ago
        The US government has an absurd amount of debt but neither major party cares and both have plans to explode it even further. As the global reserve currency the US has the ability to debase the value of it far more than any other country before serious pain occurs. But if you want a hedge against runaway inflation, plus the chance bitcoin replaces or at least eats some of the market share of gold, making bitcoin a small percentage of your retirement portfolio makes sense. It may wind up being an outsized portion of your wealth when you retire.
- fidelramos 6y ago
  Censorship-resistant payments. Protection against central banks inflation. Protection against taxation. Carrying undetectable wealth without a weight.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
unnouinceput 6y ago
https://dailyhodl.com/2020/09/28/big-bitcoin-holder-transfers-15987-btc-worth-166-million-as-ripple-moves-191000000-xrp/ https://dailyhodl.com/2020/09/28/big-bitcoin-holder-transfer... Quote from article: "The anonymous whale sent 15,987 Bitcoin worth $166 million, paying a fee of $23.46" Tell me, what bank in the world would charge only $23.46 for transferring $166 M?
- dudus 6y ago
  The anonymous whale sent from one wallet to another just to rotate their address? Or have they actually sent this money to someone else? Was this money acquired legally? Is it being used for illegal activity? A Bank would have to audit it at the very least, so there's value for the people at having banks manage that transfer rather than let them do it anonymously. Also for someone with $166M cost of a large transfer seem negligible even if it was in the 100s of thousands. Unless they need to move it all the time continuously, in which case I'd ask, why do they need that?
  - UncleDiaz12 6y ago
    Anti-Money Laundering laws only catch 0.5% of illicit funds, yet cost 100x the money recovered. https://www.ledgerinsights.com/anti-money-laundering-has-less-than-1-impact-on-crime-at-what-cost/ https://www.ledgerinsights.com/anti-money-laundering-has-les... Also, the $10K threshold for additional AML scrutiny has been the same amount for nearly 50 years. It should be close to $50k in today's dollars due to inflation.
    - nmlnn 6y ago
      In 1970 when these AML thresholds were set a dollar was tied to gold at $35/oz. So based on the gold price today it's actually: $10,000 (1970) = $10,000 x 1880/35 = ~$537,000 (2020)
- projektfu 6y ago
  Assuming you had $166m in one account at your bank, a wire transfer would be $20-35 depending.
d4c 6y ago
Decentralized finance, which includes lending, asset management, automated market making and fund-raising via tokens. See https://defipulse.com/ https://defipulse.com/ for recent growth.
- joosters 6y ago
  Defi is just the last incarnation of the blockchain-related 'get rich quick' scams, like the ICOs before it. It's proponents think that somehow it generates amazing returns out of nothing. In reality, insiders and cheats are profiting from the gullible. (again, just like ICOs)
  - ahallock 6y ago
    It's easier to call everything a scam than actually spend time to learn. There are tons of Youtube channels, Twitter accounts, Reddit pages, Discord/Telegram groups, etc. with all the information. It's hardly "insider" knowledge. Are there scams and pump & dumps? Sure. But if you manage your capital, a few rug pulls aren't going to ruin you.
petertodd 6y ago
One of the most interesting Bitcoin meetups I've ever been to was in Nairobi, Kenya, where I met a bunch of farmers who had modern, large scale, industrial operations in Kenya and other african countries. They were using Bitcoin to buy supplies like fertilizer and farm equipment, as well as sell their crops, evading border controls in the process. It was a lot safer and less prone to confiscation than carrying around a bunch of USD cash. Another example is how many porn sites and filesharing sites are also accepting Bitcoin. Eg ManyVids allows you to pay with Bitcoin via Lighting, which transfers the BTC almost instantly for quite low fees. There's obvious privacy advantages to that over credit card payments. A non-monetary use-case is my OpenTimestamps protocol, which I was able to recently use to prove a specific DKIM key was used in the past: https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/1322270551898030082 https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/1322270551898030082 Though that use-case really just piggy-backs on the financial use-cases - if not for them OpenTimestamps in its current form would not be secure.
- kylebenzle 6y ago
  Bitcoin Cash is what we call Bitcoin now. Lighting is obvious vaporware nonsense that solves only the problem of how to keep Blockstream in control of the GitHub repo they (Adam Back and Greg Maxwell) hijacked years ago.
  - petertodd 6y ago
    If you want to try Lightning out - and see for yourself whether or not it is vaporware - the easiest way to do that is to get a mobile Lightning wallet such as Eclair (fairly easy) or BlueWallet (easiest) from your appstore. As I mentioned, ManyVids accepts Lightning payments for a real product, as does https://www.bitrefill.com/ https://www.bitrefill.com/ (phone refills, gift cards, etc). For testing with smaller amounts, https://yalls.org/ https://yalls.org/ will let you buy access to blog posts for trivial amounts of money (eg one cent).
  - martinko 6y ago
    > Bitcoin Cash is what we call Bitcoin now Really? The market begs to differ.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nomad543 6y ago
Anything you can do with fiat currencies, you can do with crypto. It's going to be huge.
- vikramkr 6y ago
  Sure, people have been saying that for a while now and it hasn't materialized. What exactly is going to change that is going to make crypto able to be used like fiat currency? What exactly is in the works thats going to make that happen? Because it very obviously cannot be used to replace fiat currency currently. I mean, a lot of people are only holding cryptocurrencies because they think the value of the coin in US dollars is going to go up. "This currency will suffer from really bad deflation" is a pretty bad selling point for a new currency! So whats going to change?
- gamblor956 6y ago
  Actually, there are quite a few things you can't do with crypto that are trivial with fiat, like entering into transactions without power or internet, or paying your taxes.
AI_WAIFU 6y ago
Bond issuances seem to be a good fit for the tech. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/08/23/world-bank-prices-first-global-blockchain-bond-raising-a110-million https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/08/23/w...
emptysongglass 6y ago
There's tons of uses: you can fractionally hold real estate, Estonia uses a blockchain to ensure only citizens can grant access to their data siloes to government entities and that that data remains untampered, you can track lineage of art pieces (who owned when), there are healthcare applications, and encrypted messengers like Jami and Status leveraging. You're a few years late on the let's-hate-blockchain trend. Time to update your optics.
- kylebenzle 6y ago
  Apparently HN still hates Bitcoin, you're comment will be removed in 3, 2, 1...
- joosters 6y ago
  Real estate (and 'real' anything) on the blockchain is fatally flawed. What happens when the blockchain forks? Which fork holds the real estate, and which fork holds nothing? Or do the blockchain proponents think that the real estate will magically fork into two just like their money?
  - yowlingcat 6y ago
    Just to play a bit of a devil's advocate here, a lot of the same questions have "bedeviled" (and I mean that a little sarcastically) securities lawyers in corporate restructuring cases over the last century. And by "bedeviled" I mean not really. It's a bit of a leaky analogy that you really have to squint at to make work, but the concepts of subordination for bonds and liquidation preference for equities can roughly be analogized how to how forks achieve consensus and resolve disputes. Which is to say, the fork that the network operators (even if that's a distributed, automated consensus) agree to use is almost tautologically is the one that wins. Just like in real life with courts. That's not to say your comment doesn't have some merit -- I think a lot of blockchain proponents are also of the type to believe that manual edge case dispute resolution (otherwise known as "the law") can be completely removed from blockchain use cases. And of course that is a bit farfetched. But is that a bad goal to strive for? I don't know, I think it would be kind of neat to have some sort of algorithmic countervailing force balancing against an otherwise unstoppable proliferation of bureaucracy, corruption and regulatory capture that I see almost everywhere in the world. Is that such a bad thing?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kylebenzle 6y ago
And there is the typical HN unfounded hate for Bitcoin. I hope you never change HN.
vaccinator 6y ago
you don't have to burn a shit ton of power, you can "pre-mine" your "currency" (many did)
jiggytom 6y ago
There's also odysee.com and lbry.tv, both powered by a Bitcoin like network and P2P tech that enables a YouTube alternative. Works today, lots of great content, earn crypto while using too.

Has anyone actually found a use for cryptocurrency and/or the blockchain yet that is not "burn a shit-ton of power on arguing over units of cryptocurrency are worth anything"?

yellow_postit 6y ago

Rediscovering why some financial regulation makes sense come to mind. A petri dish for relearning.

thebean11 6y ago

Transferring money across borders, gambling, buying drugs are the main three that come to mind. edit: missed financial speculation

dudus 6y ago
I was going to say drugs, ransom, money laundering and other illegal activities are the main use cases for crypto
- seibelj 6y ago
  They also all happened before crypto. But no one spoke about the evils of fiat currency then.
  - raziel2701 6y ago
    What do I, a regular Joe not interested in buying illegal things, gain from using bitcoin? What's the proposition? Where's the value?
    - seibelj 6y ago
      The US government has an absurd amount of debt but neither major party cares and both have plans to explode it even further. As the global reserve currency the US has the ability to debase the value of it far more than any other country before serious pain occurs. But if you want a hedge against runaway inflation, plus the chance bitcoin replaces or at least eats some of the market share of gold, making bitcoin a small percentage of your retirement portfolio makes sense. It may wind up being an outsized portion of your wealth when you retire.
fidelramos 6y ago
Censorship-resistant payments. Protection against central banks inflation. Protection against taxation. Carrying undetectable wealth without a weight.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

unnouinceput 6y ago

https://dailyhodl.com/2020/09/28/big-bitcoin-holder-transfers-15987-btc-worth-166-million-as-ripple-moves-191000000-xrp/ https://dailyhodl.com/2020/09/28/big-bitcoin-holder-transfer... Quote from article: "The anonymous whale sent 15,987 Bitcoin worth $166 million, paying a fee of $23.46" Tell me, what bank in the world would charge only $23.46 for transferring $166 M?

dudus 6y ago
The anonymous whale sent from one wallet to another just to rotate their address? Or have they actually sent this money to someone else? Was this money acquired legally? Is it being used for illegal activity? A Bank would have to audit it at the very least, so there's value for the people at having banks manage that transfer rather than let them do it anonymously. Also for someone with $166M cost of a large transfer seem negligible even if it was in the 100s of thousands. Unless they need to move it all the time continuously, in which case I'd ask, why do they need that?
- UncleDiaz12 6y ago
  Anti-Money Laundering laws only catch 0.5% of illicit funds, yet cost 100x the money recovered. https://www.ledgerinsights.com/anti-money-laundering-has-less-than-1-impact-on-crime-at-what-cost/ https://www.ledgerinsights.com/anti-money-laundering-has-les... Also, the $10K threshold for additional AML scrutiny has been the same amount for nearly 50 years. It should be close to $50k in today's dollars due to inflation.
  - nmlnn 6y ago
    In 1970 when these AML thresholds were set a dollar was tied to gold at $35/oz. So based on the gold price today it's actually: $10,000 (1970) = $10,000 x 1880/35 = ~$537,000 (2020)
projektfu 6y ago
Assuming you had $166m in one account at your bank, a wire transfer would be $20-35 depending.

d4c 6y ago

Decentralized finance, which includes lending, asset management, automated market making and fund-raising via tokens. See https://defipulse.com/ https://defipulse.com/ for recent growth.

joosters 6y ago
Defi is just the last incarnation of the blockchain-related 'get rich quick' scams, like the ICOs before it. It's proponents think that somehow it generates amazing returns out of nothing. In reality, insiders and cheats are profiting from the gullible. (again, just like ICOs)
- ahallock 6y ago
  It's easier to call everything a scam than actually spend time to learn. There are tons of Youtube channels, Twitter accounts, Reddit pages, Discord/Telegram groups, etc. with all the information. It's hardly "insider" knowledge. Are there scams and pump & dumps? Sure. But if you manage your capital, a few rug pulls aren't going to ruin you.

petertodd 6y ago

One of the most interesting Bitcoin meetups I've ever been to was in Nairobi, Kenya, where I met a bunch of farmers who had modern, large scale, industrial operations in Kenya and other african countries. They were using Bitcoin to buy supplies like fertilizer and farm equipment, as well as sell their crops, evading border controls in the process. It was a lot safer and less prone to confiscation than carrying around a bunch of USD cash. Another example is how many porn sites and filesharing sites are also accepting Bitcoin. Eg ManyVids allows you to pay with Bitcoin via Lighting, which transfers the BTC almost instantly for quite low fees. There's obvious privacy advantages to that over credit card payments. A non-monetary use-case is my OpenTimestamps protocol, which I was able to recently use to prove a specific DKIM key was used in the past: https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/1322270551898030082 https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/1322270551898030082 Though that use-case really just piggy-backs on the financial use-cases - if not for them OpenTimestamps in its current form would not be secure.

kylebenzle 6y ago
Bitcoin Cash is what we call Bitcoin now. Lighting is obvious vaporware nonsense that solves only the problem of how to keep Blockstream in control of the GitHub repo they (Adam Back and Greg Maxwell) hijacked years ago.
- petertodd 6y ago
  If you want to try Lightning out - and see for yourself whether or not it is vaporware - the easiest way to do that is to get a mobile Lightning wallet such as Eclair (fairly easy) or BlueWallet (easiest) from your appstore. As I mentioned, ManyVids accepts Lightning payments for a real product, as does https://www.bitrefill.com/ https://www.bitrefill.com/ (phone refills, gift cards, etc). For testing with smaller amounts, https://yalls.org/ https://yalls.org/ will let you buy access to blog posts for trivial amounts of money (eg one cent).
- martinko 6y ago
  > Bitcoin Cash is what we call Bitcoin now Really? The market begs to differ.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

nomad543 6y ago

Anything you can do with fiat currencies, you can do with crypto. It's going to be huge.

vikramkr 6y ago
Sure, people have been saying that for a while now and it hasn't materialized. What exactly is going to change that is going to make crypto able to be used like fiat currency? What exactly is in the works thats going to make that happen? Because it very obviously cannot be used to replace fiat currency currently. I mean, a lot of people are only holding cryptocurrencies because they think the value of the coin in US dollars is going to go up. "This currency will suffer from really bad deflation" is a pretty bad selling point for a new currency! So whats going to change?
gamblor956 6y ago
Actually, there are quite a few things you can't do with crypto that are trivial with fiat, like entering into transactions without power or internet, or paying your taxes.

AI_WAIFU 6y ago

Bond issuances seem to be a good fit for the tech. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/08/23/world-bank-prices-first-global-blockchain-bond-raising-a110-million https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/08/23/w...

emptysongglass 6y ago

There's tons of uses: you can fractionally hold real estate, Estonia uses a blockchain to ensure only citizens can grant access to their data siloes to government entities and that that data remains untampered, you can track lineage of art pieces (who owned when), there are healthcare applications, and encrypted messengers like Jami and Status leveraging. You're a few years late on the let's-hate-blockchain trend. Time to update your optics.

kylebenzle 6y ago
Apparently HN still hates Bitcoin, you're comment will be removed in 3, 2, 1...
joosters 6y ago
Real estate (and 'real' anything) on the blockchain is fatally flawed. What happens when the blockchain forks? Which fork holds the real estate, and which fork holds nothing? Or do the blockchain proponents think that the real estate will magically fork into two just like their money?
- yowlingcat 6y ago
  Just to play a bit of a devil's advocate here, a lot of the same questions have "bedeviled" (and I mean that a little sarcastically) securities lawyers in corporate restructuring cases over the last century. And by "bedeviled" I mean not really. It's a bit of a leaky analogy that you really have to squint at to make work, but the concepts of subordination for bonds and liquidation preference for equities can roughly be analogized how to how forks achieve consensus and resolve disputes. Which is to say, the fork that the network operators (even if that's a distributed, automated consensus) agree to use is almost tautologically is the one that wins. Just like in real life with courts. That's not to say your comment doesn't have some merit -- I think a lot of blockchain proponents are also of the type to believe that manual edge case dispute resolution (otherwise known as "the law") can be completely removed from blockchain use cases. And of course that is a bit farfetched. But is that a bad goal to strive for? I don't know, I think it would be kind of neat to have some sort of algorithmic countervailing force balancing against an otherwise unstoppable proliferation of bureaucracy, corruption and regulatory capture that I see almost everywhere in the world. Is that such a bad thing?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

kylebenzle 6y ago

And there is the typical HN unfounded hate for Bitcoin. I hope you never change HN.

vaccinator 6y ago

you don't have to burn a shit ton of power, you can "pre-mine" your "currency" (many did)

jiggytom 6y ago

There's also odysee.com and lbry.tv, both powered by a Bitcoin like network and P2P tech that enables a YouTube alternative. Works today, lots of great content, earn crypto while using too.